Self-to-Prototype Matching as a Strategy for Making Academic Choices. Why High School Students Do Not like Math and Science.

The percentage ofschool students specializing in math and science is particularly low. The current research suggests that this is due to prototypes about math and science being highly dissimilar from self-prototypes students have or want to have of themselves. Going beyond previous studies on self-to-prototype matching, we assumed that students compare their selfviews to both a prototypical student liking a certain subject (favourite-subject-prototype) and a prototypical student disapproving ofit ( least liked subject-prototype). Results show that for humanities (German and English language), favourite-subject-prototypes were judged more positively than least-liked-subject-prototypes, whereas for science (math and physics), leastliked-subject-prototypes were perceived as more positive than favourite-subject-prototypes. As expected, only if a student’s self-prototype was quite clear (high self-clarity) was it used as a standard against which school-subject prototypes were compared with respect to their degree ofoverlap. Our results showed that the better the match between selfand f subject-prototype, the stronger were the subject preferences. # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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