Contextos Educativos Escolares: Familia, Educación Y Desarrollo Underachievers, Overachievers and Student's Self-concept

Research has related poor and good academic performance — underachievers and overachievers — to the students ‘self-concept, so that subjects with high academic levels organize and express information concerning themselves in higher levels of competency. The sample of this study involved 7th-9th grade students, divided into two groups according to their performance in Math and Science, one with good achievers and the other with underachievers. Their self-concepts were assessed with two scales (the Self-Concept as a Learner Scale and the Piers-Harris Children’s Self-Concept Scale), previously adapted to Portugal (Veiga, 1996, 2001). Analysis of the results concerning self-concept as a whole showed significant differences with higher results in students with a good performance; however, as regards the dimension “physical appearance”, students with a low academic performance presented a better self-concept than the students with high performance; as for the dimension “popularity”, no significant difference was found. In later variance analyses of the results regarding the dimensions of selfconcept in function of (school and family) variables taken simultaneously into account, specific variations that corroborate previous studies were found, while others suggest the need for further research.