role served by one of the subscales of the ASAES, that of identifying pupils’ perceptions
of their abilities.
Exploring the influence of pupils’ ability on their attitudes towards art was not
straightforward. Having no other indicators (objective assessments) for pupils’ abilities
than their responses to the attitude scale, we decided to use the results of the confidence
subscale to identify pupils with low or high self-perceptions of competence. Research
supports the belief that top-primary pupils can offer self-evaluations of academic
competence that are congruent with other objective evaluations and therefore these
should be seen as valid measures of performance affecting self-appraisals (both Assor
and Connell, 1992, and Pintrich and Schunck, 2002, offer reviews of various studies on
the issue of self-perceptions of competence and the accuracy of pupils’ self-evaluations).
At the same time, it is argued that even if self-perceptions of competence are not
accurate, these are important in determining pupils’ future achievement behaviour
(Pintrich and Shunck, 2002). In light of these research findings, the confidence subscale
was used to explore the role of perceived ability in shaping pupils’ attitudes towards art.
Based on pupils’ scores on this subscale the population was divided into two groups:
pupils with low confidence and pupils with high confidence. The median value (33) of
the confidence subscale was used to separate these two groups. Pupils who received a
score lower than 33 were characterised as low confidence pupils and pupils who received
a score of 33 and more were characterised as high confidence pupils.
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