Resumen de Attenuating the school context increases students’ academic self-concept
Big-Fish-Little-Pond (BFLP) theory posits that being surrounded by high-ability peers reduces students’ self-perceived ability –i.e., their academic self-concept (ASC), which is known to regulate the effort students put into education.We add to this literature the finding that the school context alone, without referring to peers’ ability, triggers social comparison and can decrease students’ ASC. We hypothesize that attenuating the school context increases students’ ASC. The paper shows two examples of how attenuating school context leads to an increase in ASC. In Study 1, we exploited COVID-19-induced home-based education where students learned online without their usual school context. We find that students’ ASC in reading and writingincreased outside the school context. In the randomized survey experiment of Study 2, we treated students by asking first for their ASC and subsequently their grades –thus, we attenuated the school context by ordering the questions. We asked control students first about their grades and subsequently their ASC. We found that treated students’ ASC increased in reading (but not in writing) compared to the control students who first reported their grades and then their ASC. The results indicate that the school context alone renders the perception of ability relative to peers, which triggers an unintended negative effect on students’ ASC.
