Students' Impression Management Within Class: An Empirical Study on Students' Self-Presentation Tactics

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Supporting Students' Engagement, Mental Health, and Social-Emotional Skills

Abstract

This paper addresses a so far largely neglected issue in educational research: student impression management. Impression management is defined as an individual’s active effort to present the self in a certain way. Owing to a lack of empirical studies, we primarily pursued the basic aim of designing an instrument for analyzing deliberate student tactics of self-presentation. Construct and criterion validity were tested in a sample consisting of 201 Austrian high school students. The results indicated that a correlative five-dimensional factor structure fit the data best. Beside gender-related differences it was also found that students who experience a discrepancy between how they want to be perceived and how they actually think they are perceived score differently on impression management.

Authors

• Sarah Forster - Heinzer, University of Zurich

• Arvid Nagel, St.Gallen University of Teacher Education