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The present research examined the joint effects of social, dimensional, and temporal comparisons on students' academic self-concepts and parents' beliefs about their children's competencies during students' transition phase from elementary school to junior high school. To this end, we tested the newly developed 2I/E model using longitudinal data including 2,417 students between Grades 6 and 7 and 1,846 parents. We found strong social comparison effects and moderate dimensional and temporal comparison effects on students' self-concepts. In line with our assumption that students should be particularly sensitive to changes in their achievements during phases of school transition, the temporal comparison effects were stronger than in any prior study of the 2I/E model. Parents' ratings of their children's competencies were also predicted by social, dimensional, and temporal comparisons. However, whereas the social comparison effects on students' and parents' ratings were equally strong, the dimensional and temporal comparison effects were stronger on students' ratings. We finally tested how social, dimensional, and temporal comparisons affected changes in students' self-concepts and parents' competence beliefs over 1 year. Although the effects of all 3 comparisons were still significant, we found drastic changes in their strengths, with the strongest effects on changes in competence beliefs occurring for temporal comparisons. Overall, our study provides a variety of new insights into the impact of comparison processes on the formation of competence beliefs. In particular, it emphasizes the role of temporal comparisons. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This study explores various measures of the ethnic makeup in a classroom and their relationship with student outcomes. We examine whether measures of ethnic diversity are related to achievement (mathematics, reading) and feeling of belonging with one's peers over and above commonly investigated composition characteristics. Multilevel analyses were based on data from a representative sample of 18,762 elementary school students in 903 classrooms. The proportion of minority students and diversity measures showed negative associations with student outcomes in separate models. Including diversity measures and the proportion of minority students, diversity of minority students mostly lost its significance. However, the results suggest that diversity measures may provide additional information over and above other classroom characteristics for some student outcomes. The various measures of diversity led to comparable results.