Dimensional comparison theory (DCT; Möller & Marsh 2013:Psychological Review, 120(3), 544–560), first formulated 10 years ago, describes individuals’ internal comparison processes applied between different areas of their lives. Dimensional comparisons explain the seemingly counterintuitive phenomenon that students’ verbal and mathematical self-concepts are almost uncorrelated, even though mathematical and verbal performances correlate highly positively: When students compare their performance in verbal and mathematical domains, dimensional comparisons lead to a contrast effect: students overestimate their ability in the intra-individually better domain and underestimate their ability in their intra-individually weaker domain, leading to near-zero correlations between the respective self-concepts.

This paper describes diverse extensions of the classic DCT into a variety of predictors (especially various school subjects, beyond math and native language) and criteria (especially task value components, in addition to subject-specific self-concepts) and extensions of the applicability of the DCT as an educational psychological theory to contexts such as clinical and health psychology. Recent findings on the psychological processes that trigger, accompany, and follow dimensional comparisons are summarized, before an overview of different methods to capture dimensional comparisons is given, and further research directions are discussed.

维度比较理论（DCT；Möller & Marsh 2013： Psychological Review, 120 (3), 544–560）于 10 年前首次提出，描述了个体在生活不同领域之间应用的内部比较过程。维度比较解释了看似违反直觉的现象，即学生的语言和数学自我概念几乎不相关，尽管数学和语言表现高度正相关：当学生比较他们在语言和数学领域的表现时，维度比较会导致对比效应：学生高估了自己在个体内较好领域的能力，而低估了自己在个体内较弱领域的能力，导致各自自我概念之间的相关性接近于零。

本文描述了经典 DCT 到各种预测变量（尤其是除数学和母语之外的各种学校科目）和标准（尤其是任务价值成分，除了特定于学科的自我概念之外）的各种扩展，以及适用性的扩展DCT作为一种教育心理学理论应用于临床和健康心理学等背景。总结了关于触发、伴随和遵循维度比较的心理过程的最新发现，然后概述了捕获维度比较的不同方法，并讨论了进一步的研究方向。