Teachers' inferences about students' self-concepts - the role of dimensional comparison

Research on dimensional comparison processes has shown that comparing one's own verbal achievements with poorer results in math leads to a higher self-concept of verbal ability. It has been argued that when observers make inferences about a student's academic self-concept, they do not usually have access to dimensional information. In the present study, 160 participants received a qualitative school report on a student with good achievement in German and either good or poor achievement in arithmetic. As predicted, participants' evaluation of German achievement was equal in both conditions, but inferred German self-concepts and evaluations of the student's verbal ability were higher when good achievement in German was presented together with poor achievement in arithmetic, as opposed to good achievement in arithmetic.