The Formation Mechanism Of Responsibility Of Secondary School Students

Firstly, we interviewed with children from 4th to 12th grade to know how they understood "responsibility" and "responsibility situation" they perceived in daily life. Then we reviewed the research of responsibility and self determination theory, Impressed by autonomous regulation in students and their possibily impacts to responsibility in interview and positive change in related researches, some experiments were designed to explore which factors facilitated autonomous regulation and how autonomous regulation affected responsibility taking, responsibility valuing and persistence in task.Study 1 and Study 2 were designed to explore whether the students with autonomous regulation facilitated by "meaningful rationale, acknowledging the participant's feelings, and conveying choice" had internal motivation in both studies, and whether they valued more on the task in Study 1 and persist much longer in the boring task in Study 2. Study 3 revealed autonomous regulation positively related to responsibility-taking and guilt, achievement based pride and controlled regulation negatively to responsibility-taking significantly. Why did the students with controlled regulation not want to take the responsibility? What was the mechanism under this phenomenon, further exploration was implemented in Study 4. It was disclosed the student with controlled regulation primed by "scrambled sentence task" was influenced more by the score of so called "imagination test", that was, they had unstable state self-esteem in the test and take responsibility unwillingly when they failed. It hinted us the unwillingness to take responsibility was their self defensive reaction.