Academic Self-Concept Theory

Academic self-concept theory describes how students form beliefs about their own abilities in school subjects and how those beliefs are organized in relation to each other, developed chiefly by the researchers Herbert Marsh and Richard Shavelson. Their hierarchical, multidimensional model treats a general sense of academic self-concept as sitting above a set of more specific self-concepts tied to particular subjects, such as a student's separate sense of their own ability in mathematics as against their ability in reading or another verbal subject, so that a student's overall academic self-concept is best understood as a structured combination of these subject-specific self-beliefs rather than one single, undifferentiated judgment. A central finding associated with this line of research, formalized as the internal and external frame of reference model, is that students judge their ability in a given subject partly by comparing their performance in that subject with their own performance in other subjects, an internal comparison, and partly by comparing themselves with classmates, an external comparison, and that these two kinds of comparison can pull in different directions, so that a student who performs well overall in mathematics relative to peers may still rate their own verbal self-concept as comparatively lower simply because their math performance outshines their own verbal performance. This internal comparison process helps explain a further widely replicated finding, that mathematics and verbal self-concepts are only weakly correlated even though actual mathematics and verbal achievement tend to correlate positively with each other. Academic self-concept theory has informed education research and practice on student motivation and wellbeing, since a student's belief in their own competence in a subject has been shown to influence their subsequent effort, course choices and achievement in that subject somewhat independently of their actual prior achievement.