Question Sheet: Worlds of Self-Esteem

By Science News Explores

SCIENCE

Before reading:

  1. What do schools do to help improve the self-esteem of kids? 

  2. How do you judge whether or not you like someone?

During reading:

  1. What are the positive and negative effects of high self-esteem? List four examples of each. 

  2. How many studies on self-esteem did Baumeister review? 

  3. Describe how self-esteem might be affected by scoring the winning goal in a soccer game or doing well in school. 

  4. What does the article call the “trouble with studying self-esteem”? 

After reading:

  1. Some research suggests that bullies often have high rather than low self-esteem. Given such findings, how might punishments for bullies change? 

  2. Describe someone you know (without using his or her name) who you think has high self-esteem. How do you know they are confident? 

  3. How do you think personal appearance affects self-esteem? 

  4. What questions would you ask a kid to assess his or her self-esteem? 

  5. What activities can you do to “stop focusing on yourself and look around you at the world instead”? 

SOCIAL STUDIES

Suppose you wanted to study whether politicians have tend to high or low self-esteem. How would you do such a study? What sort of observations would you make? What sort of data would you collect?

LANGUAGE ARTS

  1. Write a fable whose moral is “listen to and support other people”. 

  2. Interview someone who helps other people. For example, it could be someone working at a soup kitchen or in a civic organization. Try to find out why such a person wants to help others and how that affects his or her sense of self.

MATHEMATICS

A researcher collected the data shown in the following table, which gives the scores that male and female participants received on a test that measured self-esteem.

How many kids participated in the study? Were there more male or female participants? Did a boy or a girl get the highest score? What was the average score among boys? Among girls? Which group had the higher average score? What was the average score among all the participants? What was the median score?

Male
Female
9
11
19
16
18
18
21
24
28
23
16
8
19
16
9
26
15
26