New Paper: Basking in the Glory of Schools...

There is new paper in the Lab - "Basking in the Glory of Schools: School Characteristics and the Self-concept of Students in Mathematics".

There is one new working paper authored by the staff of the Lab. They were published in the series "Sociology" of Basic Research Program

Ksenia Tenisheva, Daniel Alexandrov. "Basking in the Glory of Schools: School Characteristics and the Self-concept of Students in Mathematics"

Our study contributes to the debate on the interaction between academic context, individual achievement, and mathematics self-concept in schools. It is known that high-achieving peers positively influence the individual achievements of all group members. At the same time, it has been shown that the self-concept of students tends to decrease in the presence of high-achieving peers, as individuals make relative judgments of their abilities vis-à-vis their peer group. Students with mediocre performance feel more confident about their abilities in a group of poor achievers (the Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect – BFLPE – introduced by H.Marsh). On the other hand, perceived prestige of a school enhances the self-confidence of students as people tend to “bask in the glory” of others (the “reflected glory” effect). We test the two effects mentioned above – BFLPE and the “reflected glory” effect. We hypothesize that both effects are stronger in highly stratified education systems where there is a stronger explicit difference between highand poor-achieving students, and schools are ranked by their prestige. We compare the interaction of academic context, achievement, and mathematics self-concept in stratified (Russia and Czech Republic) and non-stratified (Norway and Sweden) educational systems on the TIMSS’07 database using HLM7. Our study shows: 1) an absence of BFLPE for all four countries, i.e. the achievement of others is positively related to an individual’s math self-concept; 2) strong support for the “reflected glory” effect is found only in stratified educational systems; and 3) greater positive effect on self-concept for students with poor achievement who study in the best schools.

Key words: BFLPE, “reflected glory” effect, stratification, multilevel modeling, environmental effects.

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