Background: Significant proportions of young people experience body dissatisfaction, which has implications for psychological and physical well-being. Lesson content and perceived competence may be important variables for the experience of body dissatisfaction, yet these have been underexplored in physical education. The aim of this…

Empirical studies have demonstrated that students who are taught in a group of students with higher average achievement benefit in terms of their achievement. However, there is also evidence showing that being surrounded by high-achieving students has a negative effect on students' academic self-concept, also known as the big-fish--little-pond…

Given that the Big-Fish-Little-Pond-Effect, the negative effect of school-average achievement on academic self-concept, is one of the most robust findings in educational psychology (Marsh, Seaton et al., 2007), this research extends the theoretical model, based on social comparison theory, to study relative year in school effects (e.g., being 1…

Our newly proposed integrated academic self-concept model integrates 3 major theories of academic self-concept formation and developmental perspectives into a unified conceptual and methodological framework. Relations among math self-concept (MSC), school grades, test scores, and school-level contextual effects over 6 years, from the end of…

Mental health is increasingly viewed as a complete state of being, consisting of the absence of psychopathology and the presence of positive factors such as subjective well-being (SWB). This cross-sectional study analyzed multimethod and multisource data for 500 high school students (ages 14-18 years, M = 15.27 years, SD = 1.0 years) to examine…

Taiwanese students are featured as having high academic achievement but low motivational beliefs according to the serial results of the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Moreover, given that the role of context has become more important in the development of academic motivation theory, this study aimed to examine the relationship…

This research examined how children's inclusion of social personal attributes (e.g., talkative and argumentative) in their views of themselves changes over early adolescence in the United States and China. In 2 studies (N = 825 in Study 1 and 394 in Study 2) using open-ended methods (e.g., completion of "I ... " stems), American and…

Extant research reports differential effects related to the efficacy of video games as a means to enhance science instruction. However, there are very few studies examining differences in learning outcomes across student-level independent variables. This study used multilevel modeling to examine the effects of three video game-enhanced life…

This study aims to explore Bayesian multilevel modeling to investigate variations of average academic achievement of grade eight school students. A sample of 636 students is randomly selected from 26 private and government schools by a two-stage stratified sampling design. Bayesian method is used to estimate the fixed and random effects. Input and…

Using data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2007, this study examined the big-fish-little-pond-effects (BFLPEs) in 49 countries. In this study, the effect of math ability on math self-concept was decomposed into a within- and a between-level components using implicit mean centring and the complex data…

Background: Imagining one's future self is a hallmark of adolescence. But imagining is not enough; adolescents must feel that this future is plausibly likely and take action, which may require pragmatic support from parents. Prior research has examined the effect of parental aspirations and expectations on children's possible self, not the effect…

Using data from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), we explored nine aspects of science engagement (science self-efficacy, science self-concept, enjoyment of science, general interest in learning science, instrumental motivation for science, future-oriented science motivation, general value of science, personal value of…

Framed by self-determination and identity development theories, this study examined the process through which participating in a community-based service-learning project supported high school students' feelings of autonomy, competence and relatedness, and how these feelings were related to students' intentions for doing more service in the future.…

Drawing from an ecological framework, there has been growing attention on the role of peers in accounting for adolescents' homophobic behavior. In this study, we considered whether individuals' homophobic behavior could be attributed to their peers' collective levels of aggression, sexual prejudice, and importance placed on their sexual…

Achievement in mathematics of eighth-grade students is modeled as a function of within-school, between-school and cross-country differences. The data were obtained from 217,728 students, within 7,216 secondary schools, in 48 countries, who participated in the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Multilevel analysis showed…