Selbstkonzept, Kausalattributionen und Leistungsangst - Institut für ...

Zusammenfassung und Abstract
Leistungsangst der Schüler und ihren Rechtschreibleistungen bedeutsam durch die Selbstkonzeptvariable
vermittelt werden. Ähnliches gilt für den Zusammenhang zwischen dem
allgemeinen Selbstwertgefühl bzw. der Schulunlust und den Schulleistungen: Hier erweist
sich die Leistungsangst als maßgeblich vermittelnde Variable. Abschließend werden sowohl
die Implikationen dieser Befunde für künftige Forschungsbemühungen als auch deren
vorläufige Bedeutung für die pädagogische Praxis diskutiert.
Schlüsselwörter: Rechtschreibleistungen, schulfachspezifische Selbsteinschätzungen,
Selbstkonzept, Kausalattributionen, Leistungsangst
Faber, G.: Self-concept, causal attributions, and test anxiety in the spelling domain: Empirical
research findings on elementary school students’ subject-specific self-beliefs.
Abstract
In the past two decades the self-concept research in educational psychology was increasingly
able to differentiate its theoretical framework and to significantly expand its empirical
state of knowledge: in a multitude of analyses it could be consistently confirmed that selfperceptions
of students are represented in a multidimensionally and hierarchically structured
self-concept model. In the process, it has turned out, time and again, that the academic
self-concept is composed of both mathematical and verbal factors. Overall, the development
of different subject-specific self-concept facets seems to be empirically well established.
Within a broader nomological network with respect to the self-concept construct, it
can thus be assumed that related cognitive-motivational variables (such as motivational orientations
and test anxiety on the part of the students) are most probably, to a large extent,
also more pronounced with respect to the relevant school subject. There are subject-specific
relationships between these academic self-beliefs and related academic achievement which
temporarily and predominantly point to a dependence of the self-concept upon antecedent
achievement – and, longitudinally, substantiate corresponding reciprocal effects. With all
this however, the field of spelling achievement seems to have been, by comparison, only in
rare cases subject to detailed analyses – which should come as a surprise in the face of its
high significance in everyday school life. In general, there exist hardly any suitable studies
aiming at a systematic empirical analysis of spelling-specific self-concept (or corresponding
reference features). For this reason, it has been the concern of a comprehensive series
of investigations to analyze, in greater detail, the spelling-specific self-beliefs of elementary
students in the context of nomologically relevant personality and achievement variables.
Their most important results reported here concern with selected findings on the analysis of
gender-dependent differences in the achievement and self-concept variable (Study 1), on
the relations between the self-concept, test anxiety, and achievement variable (Study 2), on
the relations between the test anxiety, self-esteem, and school attitude variable (Study 3),
on the relations between the test anxiety variable and teachers’ corresponding assessments
of students’ classroom behavior (Study 4), on the relations between causal attributions, the
self-concept, and achievement variable (Study 5), and, finally, on the longitudinal relations
between the self-concept and the achievement variable (Study 6). Overall, these findings
can provide strong evidence for a partial model of academic self-beliefs in the spelling domain.
In particular, they reveal significant, but only small differences favouring the girls’
achievement scores. Corresponding self-concept differences fail to reach statistical significance.
Moreover, they demonstrate clear evidence for achievement-dependent differences
in the students’ test anxiety scores. These differences occur to be significantly moderated