The Influence Of School Choice On Academic Achievement And Academic Self-concept Of Junior Middle School Students

With the continuous improvement of people's material and cultural life level in our country, seeking high quality education has become a common demand and normal trend of the family, and with the continuous perfection of all positive policies in the compulso-ry education phase, the process of school choice is becoming more and more convenient and the phenomenon of school choice is becoming more and more common. The pur-pose of this paper is to explore "the influence of school choice on Academic Achieve-ment and Academic Self-concept of Junior Middle School students", hoping to provide Governments and Education Administrative Departments with certain reference value in constantly updating and perfecting the policies of school choice,to enlighten students and their parents about choosing different types of schools, and to cool the growing heat of school choice moderately.This research selected three different types of schools in HY District, Wuhan City:the first-class Junior Middle School (key school, Top 10 in Wuhan City), the second-class School (key school, Top 20 in Wuhan City), the third-class School (ordinary school). In order to obtain relatively balanced academic achievement, we randomly sampled 12 reg-ular classes in Grades 1-3 in the first-class Junior Middle School,eight honors classes in the Second-class School, 10 honors classes in the Third-class School, 30 classes in all,under the suggestion of Teaching Affairs Departments in the schools. We totally got 1700 students as participants. We did the questionnaire survey to them in the class group, and eventually got 1601 effective questionnaires. We also collected academic examination scores for each semester of the sampled class,and then we used SPSS 17.0 software for statistical analysis.Through Analysis of the data we revealed that:1.Choosing better schools can't effectively improve academic achievements. After controlling the initial achievements, choosing better schools had a significant negative predictive effect on the achievement in Grade 8, and the students who had chosen better schools performed worse. But the predictive effect of choosing better schools on the mid-term exam achievement in Grade 9 last semester was not significant.2.Choosing better schools has a positive effect on academic self-concept. After con-trolling the initial achievements, the school choice can positively predict the academic self-concept.3.The school types can predict academic performance and academic self-concept.The students' initial achievement can positively predict their later academic achievement.By interviewing over 20 parents of the students in better schools, we found that:1.Choosing better schools can not significantly enhance students' academic achievements.2.The negative impact of choosing better schools is mainly reflected in academic achievement and psychological pressure.3.Choosing better schools is difficult to reach parents' expectations of getting high scores.According to the results of the comprehensive survey and interviews, the following conclusions can be drawn:1 .Choosing better schools can't effectively improve academic achievements.Choosing better schools has negative influence on the academic achievement of the stu-dents with moderate initial grades.2.Choosing better schools can effectively improve academic self-concept.3.School types can positively predict academic achievement and academic self-concept.In short,choosing better schools does not necessarily improve academic achieve-ment, and sometimes choosing better schools will backfire. For parents, choosing better schools for children should be based on their real ability.