Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect

The big fish little pond effect is a frame of reference model introduced by Herbert Marsh and John Parker in 1984, holding that a person's academic self-concept depends on comparing their own ability with that of their peers, so that equally capable students have a higher self-concept in a less capable comparison group than in a more capable one. Under the model it is better for a gifted student's self-concept to be a big fish in a small pond, a regular classroom, than a big fish in a big pond, a classroom of similarly gifted peers, and high achieving and gifted students are just as susceptible to the effect as less talented students, since the effect depends only on the achievement level of the comparison group. Higher academic self-concept has been shown to predict later performance, and Marsh and O'Mara found in 2008 that tenth graders' academic self-concept predicted their educational attainment five years after high school better than their grades, test scores, measured intelligence or socioeconomic status.