Academic self-worth and accuracy of performance estimation for boys with learning disabilities and their non-handicapped peers
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between academic self-worth and ability to accurately estimate personal performance on an academic, a non-academic, and a novel task in learning disabled and non-learning disabled adolescent males. Subjects were 84 males in grades seven through nine. Subjects were divided into two groups: learning disabled and those free of known learning problems. Subjects completed the Self-Description Questionnaire II, a measure of self-worth, and were asked to estimate their performance on three tasks: mathematics problems (academic task), nerf basketball shots (non-academic task), and the Purdue Pegboard (novel task). Differences were expected between learning disabled and non-learning disabled boys' abilities to estimate performance on academic tasks as compared to non-academic or novel tasks. It was predicted that learning disabled boys would have lower academic self-worth than non-learning disabled boys. Those boys with low academic self-worth were predicted to be less accurate in estimation of performance than those with high academic self-worth, regardless of the presence of a learning disability. The relationship between academic self-worth and estimation of performance on the three tasks was not expected to differ as function of the presence or absence of a learning disability; however, it was expected that the relationship between academic self-worth would be stronger for academic tasks than for non-academic or novel tasks. Attributions for performance were predicted to be different for the two groups on the academic task only. Results indicated that the groups differed in accuracy of estimations of performance on the academic task only. No differences in self-worth were found between the groups. No relationship was found between academic self-worth and accuracy of estimates of academic performance. No differences between the groups were found in the relationship of academic self-worth and ability to estimate performance on any of the three tasks; however, significant differences were found in the correlation of academic self-worth with the novel task when compared to the correlation of academic self-worth with the academic task. Significant differences between the groups' attributions for performance were found on both the academic and non-academic tasks.
Subject Area
Psychology|Educational psychology
Recommended Citation
Teta, Joseph Richard, "Academic self-worth and accuracy of performance estimation for boys with learning disabilities and their non-handicapped peers" (1993). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI9412150.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI9412150
