School Achievement,Perceived Academic Competence and Global Self-esteem 1

Abstract

The relationships between school achievement, global (negative) self-evaluations and the more specific academic facet of self-evaluations (Perceived Academic Competence: PAC) were examined in four cohorts of children in grades six through nine. The entire sample included 1102 girls and 1207 boys. The analyses lead to the following results and conclusions. (1) School achievement was only weakly related to global negative self-evaluations (r around -0.20). However, the correlations between PAC and achievement were somewhat higher than previously reported results (r around 0.65). (2) We found little or no support for the widespread assumption that perceived importance of school achievement moderates the relationship between perceived academic competence and global self-esteem (interactive hypothesis). (3) We found perceived importance to be moderately correlated with PAC (r around 0.30). The correlations were somewhat higher in higher grades. Our main conclusion was that time is ripe to question the usual model for the relation between global self-esteem and other dimensions of self.