Gender role self-concept at school start and its impact on academic self-concept and performance in mathematics and reading

Abstract

This research investigates children’s self-ascriptions of feminine and masculine attributes (gender role self-concept) and whether they predict academic self-concepts and performance in gendered subject domains in their early Bildung-career. We suggest that as children incorporate gender stereotypes into their self-concept, perceptions of their competence (cognitive component of academic self-concepts), their affective-motivational reactions (affective component of academic self-concepts), as well as their performance in reading and mathematics are shaped accordingly. In a sample of 113 first graders we (1) measured gender role self-concept, and (2) analyzed its impact on children’s academic self-concepts and performance in mathematics and reading half a year later. As expected, girls ascribed comparatively more feminine and boys comparatively more masculine-stereotyped behaviors to themselves. Furthermore, the more feminine children described themselves the better was their reading performance half a year later, while no indirect effects, mediated via the academic self-concept, appeared. Also, the more masculine children described themselves, the higher were their mathematics related ability self-concepts half a year later, however, mathematics achievements were unrelated to any of the other variables. We discuss that future research needs to more systematically study the variables investigated in this research in children as they move from school start into third grade when the gender role self-concept as well as differences between girls and boys in their academic self-concepts, their liking for different school subjects, and their skills are well established.

Keywords:

• Academic self-concepts
• gender role self-concept
• gender differences
• reading
• mathematics
• primary school

Notes

1 The slightly uneven distribution of children’s gender resulted from our longitudinal design: 65 boys and 70 girls sampled from 117 different preschools in Berlin, Germany, had first been investigated in kindergarten, where only one child had been sampled per kindergarten group. Those children were then followed up into their first grade in primary school, however, some of the children dropped out of the study (in most cases because they could no longer be reached), and were not included in the analyses for the present study (for a detailed description of the sampling strategy see Wolter, Glüer, & Hannover, 2014).

2 All path models were also calculated including children’s trait-based self-descriptions. The results of the models remained the same, however, the model fits were somewhat lower, confirming our decision not to include the trait-based items.