Chapter 4: Academic Self-Concept in the Sciences

What are the goals of school education? No doubt the development of domain-specific knowledge is very important. However, school education should also contribute to a positive psychosocial and motivational development (OECD, 2003, 2013). That is, students should feel comfortable in school, be confident in their academic ability, be motivated to learn and aspire to educational success. Academic self-concept, the self-evaluation of a student’s ability in a given domain, is one of the most important motivational factors in educational psychology. Its positive relation to academic achievement has been impressively documented in longitudinal studies and meta-analyses and has been shown to be reciprocal (Chen, Yeh, Hwang, & Lin, 2013; Hattie, 2008; Huang, 2011; Marsh & Martin, 2011; Marsh & O’Mara, 2008; Valentine et al., 2004). That is, not only do students who do better in school feel better about their ability afterwards, but students who are confident in their abilities will also start to do better in school. In addition, students with higher self-concepts will show higher effort, attainment, academic aspirations, and intrinsic motivation (Guay, Larose, & Boivin, 2004; Nagengast & Marsh, 2012; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000). Because of these characteristics, academic self-concept is now considered an important educational outcome in its own right and research on academic self-concept has been “at the heart of the positive psychology revolution” (Marsh et al., 2015, p. 170) in educational psychology and beyond. Given the importance of this outcome—which I only briefly summarized here given that readers of this volume will likely agree with me in this regard—it is surprising that, compared to math and languages, few studies on academic self-concepts were conducted within the subject area of science.