Who Flourishes in School? An Integrative Examination of Student Personality and Academic Self-Concepts across Learning Environments

Abstract

Education has been integral to human societies throughout history, and successful education benefits both individuals and communities. Educational success is especially critical throughout the developmental phase of adolescence. Adolescents face age-specific developmental tasks that refer to academic performance and individual development. Theoretical perspectives emphasise that (academic) development results from transactions between individual characteristics and contextual conditions. Accordingly, individual self-perceptions such as student personality and academic self-concept contribute to academic performance. At the same time, contextual conditions including student sociodemographic characteristics, classroom peers, and teachers shape students’ individual development of self-perceptions. Along these lines this dissertation integrated theoretical perspectives from developmental, personality, motivational, and educational psychology and studied the role of student personality and academic self-concept in academic performance and their development within the school context. Thereby, it addressed three overarching research aims. First, it examined how student personality and academic self-concepts relate to each other and jointly contribute to academic performance. Second, it investigated the role of individual self-perceptions in social inequalities relating to individual sociodemographic characteristics. Third, it inspected how peers and teachers shape the development of individual self-perceptions.

To address these overarching aims, this dissertation comprises three studies that took different perspectives on the role of individual self-perceptions in education. Study 1 integrated student personality and academic self-concepts and examined their role in social inequalities. More specifically, it tested the interrelations between and conjoint predictivity of student personality and academic self-concepts, as well as their moderating role in social inequalities. To do so, it applied latent moderated regression models to two large-scale samples of German secondary school students with diverse sociodemographic compositions. Study 2 addressed whether classroom peers shape the development of student personality. It provides a thorough investigation of how the classroom personality composition contributes to students’ individual personality development by applying three different strategies of estimating multilevel structural equation models. Lastly, Study 3 applied (moderated) conditional latent growth curve models to predict academic self-concept development by student personality, teaching behaviour, and their respective interplay. Altogether, the three studies provide comprehensive insights into the role of student personality and academic self-concepts within the school environment, as well as the complexity of transactions between students and the school environment. Specifically, results support the interrelatedness and indicate interactive effects of the two self-perceptions on academic performance, while also revealing important differences across academic domains. Moreover, student personality and academic self-concepts potentially reinforce social inequalities. Lastly, the results support interactions between student personality and teaching behaviour in predicting academic self-concept (development), while pointing toward the need for further research on the role of classroom peers in individual personality development.

This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the role of individual self-perceptions in educational success and provides three overarching implications. First, it corroborates the utility of integrating different theoretical perspectives on the role of individual self-perceptions in education as an interdisciplinary perspective best reflects the complex interactive relations between individual self-perceptions and with contextual conditions. Second, it illustrates the impact of methodological aspects such as the specific measures used, sample composition, and modelling strategies, and elucidates how methodological diversity can contribute to a differentiated understanding of individual self-perceptions in education. Lastly, this dissertation substantiates the crucial role of teachers by illuminating their role in social inequalities and in shaping students’ academic self-perceptions. Accordingly, teachers are valuable targets for educational policies and interventions, as their behavior can contribute to reducing social disparities and supporting individual student development. Nevertheless, future research should aim for further refinements by implementing advanced research designs across various educational systems that tap into the causality of associations, incorporate multi-method measures, and disentangle inter- and intraindividual variations in developmental trajectories.