Best of: Student Characteristics and Self-Concept

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Re-posted from January 3, 2011

by Lynne Cox

About 18 months ago I wrote a blog titled “Emotional Intelligence and Positive Self-Concept” which provided an overview for a study I designed for the purpose of investigating relationships between self-concept and participation in secondary CTE programs.

To refresh your memory, self-concept, discussed as a scholarly topic since the time of Socrates and Plato, is an important theoretical construct in education because self-concept is considered to be a desirable trait and a facilitator of positive future behavior. Self-concept is generally considered, by researchers in the field, a multi-dimensional construct and may vary according to domain; the way we think about and categorize ourselves as a “math” or “English” person, as “creative” or “athletic,” or as “beautiful” or “intelligent” is a practical example of the domain-specific nature of self-concept. High or low self-concept in one domain does not necessarily correlate with high or low self-concept in another domain.

General self-concept, also called self-esteem, is an overall view of oneself that is not generally correlated with domain-specific self-concept.  General self-concept is based on personal thoughts, interpretations, and beliefs: “It is not how good (or bad) you really are, but how good (or bad) you think you are that determines your behavior” (Bandura, 2003, p.377). According to Bandura (2003), individuals with high general self-concept set more challenging goals for themselves and are more persistent in the face of adversity than their counterparts with low general self-concept.

Recently I conducted this study to examine the relationship between the characteristics of students enrolled in AAVTC programs and students’ self-concept scores as measured by specific subscales from the Self-Description Questionnaire (SDQ). A total of 196 male and 89 female secondary students (Grades 9-12) participated in the study. Student characteristic variables of interest were age, gender, CTE program enrollment, and participation in CTE. The self-concept subscales analyzed were General, Academic, Verbal, Math, and Problem Solving.

The study detected a relationship between specific student characteristics and self-concept as measured on certain domain-specific first-order factors. Gender and participation in CTE over time were found to be the most important contributors to the student characteristic variable. Verbal self-concept and problem-solving self-concept contributed the most to the self-concept variable.  The interaction between student characteristics and self-concept, for this study, indicates that while participation in CTE does positively relate to problem-solving self-concept, gender is still the primary variable in predicting a student’s self-concept.

Results suggest that females in arts-based CTE programs have a higher verbal self-concept than males enrolled in the same programs, which is in line with prior research in the area of giftedness and self-concept. Findings indicate that male students in arts-based CTE programs have a higher problem-solving self-concept than their female counterparts.

Results from this study, although inconclusive based on effect size interpretation, suggest that students with a high level of participation also have high verbal and problem-solving self-concepts. Considering the instructional activities required in these particular CTE programs, this is a logical outcome and is consistent with self-concept studies of secondary students in specialized arts programs.

Age was found to be unrelated to self-concept.  This lack of relationship, especially when compared to the relationship between participation in CTE and self-concept, is in line with the theory that individuals develop self-concepts as a direct result of the interactions and activities they choose to participate in over time. Because students choose to participate in activities that help them develop their verbal and problem-solving abilities, it makes sense that their verbal and problem-solving self-concepts will improve independent of their age.

These findings add to the literature concerning the area of self-concept as it relates to student participation in CTE programs. Given the shortage of research in this general area, the study represents a first step in examining a relationship between CTE students and the development of self-concept.  Stay tuned to recommendations and more information on this topic!

Reference

Bandura, A. (2003). Social-cognitive theory. In R. B. Ewen (Ed), An introduction to theories of personality (pp. 365-385). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.