Am I a good person? Academic correlates of explicit and implicit self-esteem during early childhood

Dario Cvencek; Ružica Brečić; Elizabeth A Sanders; Dora Gaćeša; David Skala; Andrew N Meltzoff

doi:10.1111/cdev.14052

Am I a good person? Academic correlates of explicit and implicit self-esteem during early childhood

Child Dev. 2023 Dec 26. doi: 10.1111/cdev.14052. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Dario Cvencek¹, Ružica Brečić², Elizabeth A Sanders³, Dora Gaćeša², David Skala², Andrew N Meltzoff^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA.
² Department of Marketing, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia.
³ Measurement and Statistics, College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA.
⁴ Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA.

PMID: 38148568
DOI: 10.1111/cdev.14052

Abstract

Implicit and explicit self-esteem are not commonly measured in the same children. Using a cross-sectional design, data from 354 Croatian children (184 girls) in Grade 1 (M_age = 7.55 years) and Grade 5 (M_age = 11.58 years) were collected in Spring 2019. All children completed explicit and implicit self-esteem measures; math and language grades were obtained. For the explicit measure, older children showed lower self-esteem than younger children, and girls showed lower self-esteem than boys. For the implicit measure, there were no age effects, and girls showed higher self-esteem than boys. Although both types of self-esteem were positively associated with academic achievement, implicit self-esteem was associated more strongly with language than with math achievement. Discussion is provided about why self-esteem relates to academic achievement during childhood.

Keywords: gender differences; implicit and explicit attitudes; school achievement; self-esteem.

Abstract

Grants and funding