Children's action-control beliefs about school performance: how do American children compare with German and Russian children?
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Publication Details
Output type: Journal article
Author list: Little, Oettingen, Stetsenko, Baltes
Publisher: American Psychological Association
Publication year: 1995
Journal: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (0022-3514)
Volume number: 69
Issue number: 4
Start page: 686
End page: 700
Number of pages: 15
ISSN: 0022-3514
eISSN: 1939-1315
Languages: English-Great Britain (EN-GB)
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Open access status: closed
Abstract
Using the revised Control, Agency, and Means-ends Interview (T. D. Little, G. Oettingen, & P. B. Baltes, 1995), we compared American children's (Grades 2-6) action-control beliefs about school performance with those of German and Russian children (Los Angeles, n = 657; East Berlin, n = 313; West Berlin, n = 517; Moscow, n = 541). Although we found pronounced cross-setting similarities in the children's everyday causality beliefs about what factors produce school performance, we obtained consistent cross-setting differences in (a) the mean levels of the children's personal agency and control expectancy and (b) the correlational magnitudes between these beliefs and actual school performance. Notably, the American children were at the extremes of the cross-national distributions: (a) they had the highest mean levels of personal agency and control expectancy but (b) the lowest beliefs-performance correlations. Such outcomes indicate that the low beliefs-performance correlations that are frequently obtained in American research appear to be specific to American settings.
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