Paradoxically, school leaders as a group report high levels of burnout but also high job satisfaction and passion for their work. School principals are passionate about their job, but this passion can be a double-edged sword leading to good (job satisfaction) and bad (burnout) outcomes. We extend the dualistic model of passion (DMP) in a study of…

Many large-scale, school-based interventions have attempted to improve academic performance through promoting students' growth mindset, defined as the belief that one's intellectual ability can increase with practice and time. However, most have shown weak to no effects. Thus, it is important to examine how growth mindset might affect retention…

Peer support interventions have mostly neglected the domain specificity of intervention effects. In two studies, the present investigation examined the domain specificity of peer support interventions targeting specific domains of self-concept. In Study 1, participants ("n" = 50) who had received an academically oriented peer support…

Research suggests that motivated students and those with high academic self-concepts perform better academically. Although substantial evidence supports a reciprocal relation between academic self-concept and achievement, there is less evidence supporting a similar relation between achievement goal orientations and achievement. There is also a…

(This study examines the directionality of the associations among cognitive assets (IQ, academic achievement), motivational beliefs (academic self-concept, task values), and educational and occupational aspirations over time from late adolescence (Grade 10) into early adulthood (5 years post high school). Participants were from a nationally…

The most popular measures of multidimensional constructs typically fail to meet standards of good measurement: goodness of fit, measurement invariance, lack of differential item functioning, and well-differentiated factors that are not so highly correlated as to detract from their discriminant validity. Part of the problem, the authors argue, is…

Research on the relation between students' achievement (ACH) and their academic self-concept (ASC) has consistently shown a Big-Fish-Little-Pond-Effect (BFLPE); ASC is positively affected by individual ACH, but negatively affected by school-average ACH. Surprisingly, however, there are few good UK studies of the BFLPE and few anywhere in the world…

NEO instruments are widely used to assess Big Five personality factors, but confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) conducted at the item level do not support their a priori structure due, in part, to the overly restrictive CFA assumptions. We demonstrate that exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), an integration of CFA and exploratory…

In this investigation, we used a classic latent profile analysis (LPA), a person-centered approach, to identify groups of students who had similar profiles for multiple dimensions of academic self-concept (ASC) and related these LPA groups to a diverse set of correlates. Consistent with a priori predictions, we identified 5 LPA groups representing…

Two studies integrate the big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE; negative effects of class-average achievement on academic self-concept, ASC), which is based upon educational psychological research, with related social psychological research that is based on social comparison theory. Critical distinctions are the nature of the social comparison…

Relations between self-concept and mental health are best understood from a multidimensional perspective. For responses by 903 adolescents (mean age = 12.6) to a new French translation of the Self Description Questionnaire II (SDQII), confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated a well-defined multidimensional factor structure of reliable, highly…

Collected test-retest data from 606 students in grades 3 through 6 in Australia to evaluate a Big Two-Factor Theory of academic motivation orientation. Findings provide reasonable support for the Big Two-Factor theory but suggest it is still useful to collect data from different motivation scales. (SLD)

A meta-analysis of 105 studies reporting 152 self-concept interventions in school settings was conducted. The aims of the study were twofold: to explore the construct validity approach to self-concept interventions, and to examine aspects of the administration of the interventions, namely treatment setting, administrator type, administrator…

Four studies evaluate the new Self Description Questionnaire II short-form (SDQII-S) that measures 11 dimensions of adolescent self-concept based on responses to 51 of the original 102 SDQII items and demonstrate new statistical strategies to operationalize guidelines for short-form evaluation proposed by G. T. Smith, D. M. McCarthy, and K. G.…

Developed and tested the psychometric properties of the 38-item Self Description Questionnaire for Preschoolers. Found that the scale was reliable for young children, first-order and higher order confirmatory factor analysis models fit the data, and factor correlations were mostly moderate. Achievement test scores correlated moderately with…