Self-concept, self-esteem and academic achievement: Strategies for maintaining self-esteem in students experiencing academic failure

摘要

Previous research into the relationship between self-esteem and academicachievement shows that despite differences in academic self-evaluation, students’ globalself-representations do not differ as a result of their grades at school. In this study, we willanalyse the strategies that underachievers used to maintain their self-esteem at an acceptablelevel. The participants were 955 adolescents in the 7th, 9th and 11th grades at foursecondary schools in Lisbon. Three hundred fifty-two of these students had retaken a yearat least once in their school careers, whilst 603 had never done so. We collected the datausing both a self-concept scale and a scale for evaluating attitudes towards school. Resultsshow that self-esteem is maintained through positive self-representations in non-academicfacets of self-concept and/or by devaluing school-related competences. They also show thatyounger students are less likely to maintain self-esteem by devaluing the school experience.