Academic self-concept, gender and single-sex schooling in the 1970 British Cohort Study

(2006) - Alice Sullivan

Journal: CLS Cohort Studies
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Tags:: #paper #NCDS #Gender #BCS #SchoolType
Cite Key:: [@Sullivan2006]

Abstract

Men have more confidence in their own abilities than women in many areas, including the evaluation of their own academic abilities, or ‘academic self-concept’ (Colwill, 1982). Boys are especially likely to rate their abilities more highly than girls in subjects that are perceived as ‘masculine’ such as mathematics and the sciences (Joffe and Foxman, 1988, Marsh, 1989, Marsh and Yeung, 1998, Wilgenbusch and Merrell, 1999). This gender difference emerges at an early age, and has been observed among primary school children (Tizard et. al. 1988, Parsons et. al. 1976). Although there is a consensus in the literature that self-concept declines as children get older, there have been mixed findings on the effect of students’ age on the gender gap. Some studies have found that the gender gap in self-concept increases during adolescence, while others have found that the gap is either constant or diminishes somewhat during the secondary school years (Eccles, 1987, Jacobs, et al., 2002). This paper addresses the question of whether gender had an impact on academic self-concept for a cohort of 16-year olds born in 1970, and whether singlesex and selective schooling had any impact on self-concept for boys or girls. We are able to use previously unanalysed data from the 1986 sweep of the longitudinal British Cohort Study 1970 (BCS70).

Notes

“Boys had higher self-concepts in mathematics and science, and girls in English.” (Sullivan, 2009, p. 259)