Self-Esteem and Students in Today\'s

Self-Esteem and Students

In today's classrooms, it has become so easy to find numerous self-esteem issues. One that was interesting is what effect self-esteem has on the achievements of that student compared to the rest of their peers.

Thompson & Perry (2005) conducted research based on the above mentioned and found that students motivated to protect self-worth perform poorly in situations that threaten to reveal low ability while performing well in situations that involve little threat to self-worth. One factor contributing to their poor performance was stated to be their orientation towards social comparison goals (goals that have to do with vindicating their ability relative to others rather than pursuing mastery). In this study, 96 undergraduate students who were either high or low in self-worth protection were exposed to either success or failure feedback and subsequently primed to pursue either social comparison or mastery goals. For students high in self-worth protection, the negative effects of either failure or social comparison goal priming is sufficient to give rise to poor performance. However, only when success was combined with mastery goal priming a positive achievement outcome was evident.

Another aspect of research that I thought it was important to conduct was to see if there was any critical differences found between Black and white students on the aspect of self-esteem and class achievement. The following research supported my hypothesis that there would not be a significant difference between the two. Demo & Parker (1987) conducted research on self-esteem among black and white Americans including elementary school and high school students. In the study, data on 298 black and white college students and an examination of the relationship between student's grade point average and self-esteem were presented. Several findings corroborate earlier research on school-age children. Self-esteem scores of blacks and whites were not significantly different, despite blacks having significantly lower grade point averages than whites. The relationship between grade point average and self-esteem, however, was negligible among blacks and among white males, suggesting that academic achievement is not critical to the self-concept of college students