A comparative-longitudinal study of action-control beliefs and school performance: On the role of context

In a previous cross-sectional study comparing East and West Berlin children (Oettingen, Little, Lindenburger, & Baltes, 1994), we found that children in West Berlin had higher beliefs in their own performance potential than in East Berlin, but that the correlation between these personal agency beliefs and actual school performance was stronger in East Berlin than in West Berlin. In this study, we report on a three-wave longitudinal follow-up of the original samples wherein we examined the impact of change in the East Berlin education system, which adopted the West Berlin system between the second and third measurement occasions. As expected, we found that the context change did not affect the East Berlin children's (grades 2-5, n = 198) lower mean levels of agency beliefs; however, the changes did reduce the correlations between the beliefs and performance to the levels observed in West Berlin (n = 381).