Intelligence Identity Across Three California High Schools

• In Event: 207 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 23. Education, Identity, and the Body

Abstract

We introduce the concept of students’ “intelligence identity,” a personal identity that we define broadly as a student’s perception of how smart he or she is. This concept adds to scholarship on academic achievement and students’ self-efficacy beliefs by attempting to capture a more holistic self-understanding of intelligence, recognizing that students’ lives move in and out of their school context. We ask the question: how much of a student’s intelligence identity do school factors explain? We explore the relationship between intelligence identity and variables such as: grades; race, gender, school context; student’s perceptions of their teachers and standardized test scores; and how smart a student thinks her family and friends believe her to be. We find that academic factors have a much smaller effect on intelligence identity than do friends’ and family’s impressions. Interestingly, students on average rate their own intelligence identities as lower than they think their families would rate them, but higher than they think their friends would rate them. We suggest that school environments matter for intelligence identity, as gender, race, grades and other variables are significant in some schools but not others. The study was conducted with an original nine-item questionnaire attached to the California Healthy Kids Survey at three high schools in one district (N=3,769).

Authors

• Lisa Michele Nunn, University of San Diego

• Kelsey Perry, University of San Diego