The purpose of the present study was to investigate influence of perfectionism on middle school students worry. Furthermore, this study aimed at examining the role of cognitive emotion regulation strategies and perceived emotional competence as mediating factors in the relationship between multiple dimensions of perfectionism and worry. For this purpose, 416 middle school students in Seoul were asked to complete four questionnaires-Perfectionism Scale, Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, Trait Meta Mood Scale, and Penn State Worry Questionnaire. As a result, maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation showed partial mediating effect on relationship between perfection in evaluation concerns and worry while perfection in personal standards and in social expectation showed complete mediating effect. In addition, perceived emotional competence had partial mediating effect on relationship between perfection in evaluation concerns and worry. This results have implication that underlying mechanisms of worry of middle school students were examined in relation to personality and emotion regulation and furthermore, provided useful information for therapeutic intervention. Limitations of the present study and suggestions for future studies were discussed.
School engagement as a multidimensional construct has been known not only as a predictor of academic achievement, school adjustment, and school dropout but also as a mediator in the relations between school/family context or personal variables and adjustment outcomes. This study was conducted to test the fit of a multidimensional model of school engagement consisting of three factors (i.e., affective, behavioral, cognitive) and examine the decreasing tendency of school engagement during the transition to middle school. Wang, Willett, and Eccles’s (2011) school engagement measures were administered to 1,172 students in Grades 5 to 8. Confirmatory factor analyses and latent mean analyses were conducted to examine research questions. First, confirmatory factor analyses revealed that, in all of the four groups (i.e., elementary school boys, elementary school girls, middle school boys, middle school girls), the three-factor model of school engagement fit the data better than the one-factor model and the two-factor model. Second, the four groups did not significantly differ in the composition of the three factors and factor loadings. Third, there were no significant differences in the intercepts of the observed variables between elementary and middle school students in each gender. Given that both factor loadings and intercepts were invariant, latent mean analyses were conducted to test the latent mean differences on affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement. Both boys and girls showed a significant decrease in each factor of school engagement. The effect sizes of latent mean differences on each factor by gender and school level showed that after the transition to middle school affective engagement declined to a greater extent than did behavioral and cognitive engagement and the three factors of school engagement decreased to a greater extent for girls than for boys. Finally, the necessity of identifying school engagement styles and testing the second-order model with one second-order factor (i.e., school engagement as a meta construct) and several first-order factors (e.g., affective, behavioral, cognitive engagement) was discussed.
The purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between achievement goal orientation, basic need satisfaction, academic achievement and adjustment of teachers’ college students. The study enrolled 450 College of Education and National University of Education students. The instruments were achievement goal orientation, basic need satisfaction, and adjustment. GPA was the academic achievement of the students at the first semester of 2012. Mastery approach goal orientation had a positive effect on autonomy, competence and relatedness. Mastery- and performance avoidance goal orientations had negative effects on autonomy and competence. Competence had a positive effect on academic achievement, and competence and relatedness had positive effects on adjustment. In the research of mediation effect, mastery approach goal orientation had a positive effect on the academic achievement and adjustment by the mediation of autonomy, competence and relatedness. Mastery avoidance goal orientation had a negative effect on academic achievement by the mediation of autonomy, competence and relatedness. Performance avoidance goal orientation had a negative effect on university adjustment by the mediation of autonomy, competence and relatedness. When the researchers analyzed the discrete factors of the basic need satisfaction, competence played as a mediating variable between achievement goal orientation and academic achievement. In the relationship between achievement goal orientation and adjustment, competence and relatedness played as positive mediating variables between mastery avoidance and adjustment. Implications for the research related to the literatures and suggestions are discussed.
This study was to investigate the effects of childhood trauma, victimizing and perpetrating of bullying, psychiatric problems and academic achievement stress on intention of school dropout. For this purpose, data was collected from the students of a middle school in a city of Gyeonggi-do. In order to identify the longitudinal effect of childhood trauma and the mediational role of psychiatric problem, bullying and academic stress, we used Structural Equation Modeling. The model confirmed a good fit to the data. Generally, childhood emotional abuse and neglect associated with psychiatric problem in adolescents which resulted in intention of school dropout. Also, childhood emotional abuse associated with victimizing which resulted in the intention. Even though perpetrating and academic stress failed to predict the intention, physical abuse was associated with victimizing and perpetrating and neglect was associated with perpetrating academic stress. We also explored gender difference in path coefficients by multi-sample SEM. The results showed that the paths from neglect to psychiatric problems and from victimizing to intention of dropout were significants only in females. Additionally, the effect of psychiatric problems on intention of dropout was stronger in males. Finally, the results and implications of this study discussed with the stream of previous research.