Effect of ability grouping on self-esteem and academic self-concept : a comparison between Hong Kong and Australian adolescents

Abstract

There is a debate that ability grouping may have harmful effect on the self-esteem development of students, whereas there is also a counter argument that students’ selfesteem could be enhanced through this kind of educational practice as their outstanding performance are being acknowledged. This article reported a study to address this issue. Three separate groups of students from Hong Kong (in Secondary 1 and 3) and Australia (in Grade 7 and 9) were sampled (N=1,015). Their levels of self-esteem and academic self-concept were measured by SDQ II (Marsh, 1992), an instrument that has been widely used for cross-culturally studies between Hong Kong and Australian adolescents. As our interest was the effect of ability grouping, data on school banding (for the Hong Kong participants) and school type (for the Australian participants) were also collected. Results found that there were no deleterious effects of ability grouping on self esteem and academic self-concept for the Hong Kong and Australian samples. Findings were discussed with reference to a more recent re-conceptualization of the Big-Fish- Little-Pond effect and the ways of practicing ability grouping in Hong Kong and Australian education systems.