Background: Low-stakes assessments do not have consequences for the test-takers. Currently, motivational research indicates that a lack of test-taking motivation can decrease students' performance in low-stakes assessments. However, little research has explored the domain-specific and situation-specific aspects of motivation simultaneously. Research examining differences in test-taking motivation among students in different types of schools is also limited. Our study therefore addressed the motivational determinants of test performance in low-stakes assessments, in general, as well as school-track-specific differences in particular. Method: Drawing on national data from students who participated in a cross-national study of educational achievement, we conducted multiple regression analyses to predict the students' test performance and the effort they invested in that test. We conducted the analyses for the entire sample as well as for the students in that sample separated according to the school track they were attending.

Not living up to one's ideal self has been shown to coincide with decreased self-esteem. In the present paper, this notion is applied to the differentiation between people with independent versus interdependent self-construal. We suggest that the ideal self of independents differs in two respects from the one of interdependents: with respect to its contents (autonomous versus social self-knowledge) and with respect to the degree of context-dependency of the encoded knowledge (context-independent versus context-dependent self-knowledge). In three studies, via a priming we either manipulated contents or degree of context-dependency of what participants considered themselves to actually be like. On both explicit and implicit measures, participants with independent construal indicated higher self-esteem after priming of autonomous and context-independent knowledge than after priming of social and context-dependent knowledge. The opposite pattern was observed in participants with interdependent construal. Results suggest that independent and interdependent construals mirror different ideals which are applied as a comparison standard when evaluating the self. Past research has shown that self-esteem is dependent on the extent to which what a person wants to be, corresponds with what that person considers he or she actually is. For instance, in a study by Moretti and Higgins (1990), students were asked to generate attributes they believed they actually possessed and attributes they ideally wished or hoped to possess. In a second step, participants had to indicate the extent to which they believed they possessed or wished they possessed each attribute. Results showed that self-esteem was the higher the smaller the deviation between what the persons considered themselves to actually be like and what they wanted to be like. Many other studies have since provided additional support for the notion that self-esteem is the outcome of a comparison between actual self-views and standards, goals, or ideals which the person holds for his or her self (e.g.

Abstract. We investigated consequences of priming East-West-German related self-knowledge for the strength of implicit, ingroup-directed positive evaluations among East- and West-Germans. Based on previous studies we predicted opposite effects of self-knowledge priming for East- and West-Germans. Since in general the East-German stereotype is regarded as more negative than the West-German one, bringing to mind East-West-related self-knowledge (relative to neutral priming) was expected to attenuate ingroup favoritism for East-Germans, but to increase it for West-Germans. After having fulfilled the priming tasks, participants worked on an IAT-version in which the to be classified stimuli were East- or West-German city names (dimension 1) and positive or negative adjectives (dimension 2). Results of Experiment 1 showed (a) that East- and West-German students implicitly evaluated their ingroups as more positive than the outgroups and (b) confirmedthe predictions of the priming influence. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with more representative samples from East- and West-Germany. The results are discussed with regard to underlying processes of implicit attitudes in intergroup contexts.

We suggest that social relationships shape the self in different ways, depending on whether persons define themselves as independent or interdependent. While the self of independents is most strongly associated with mental representations of others to whom they are related because of their own deliberate action (e.g. friends), the self of interdependents is most strongly connected with representations of others with whom they share allocated group memberships (e.g. family members). We took both explicit (Study 1) and implicit measures (Studies 2, 3 and 4) on how strongly independent and interdependent selves are associated with self-chosen versus allocated close others. In Studies 3 and 4, we additionally primed the independent or interdependent self. Both explicit and implicit measures indicated that mental representations of family members were more strongly associated with the interdependent self than with the independent self, while romantic partners and friends were connected with both the independent and interdependent self.self-construal (interdependents) and people with independent self-construal (independents) on how strongly they feel related to their close others (

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