A Study On High School Students' Academic Self-handicapping And Its' Influencing Factor

According to self-worth theory, students are motivated to build their self-worth. The self-worth is primary determined by the perception of his ability deduced by his own or others. People often estimate others' ability by their achievements, if you are defeated, other people will deem that you lack ability. For the competition of educational system, some students are doomed to fail, therefore, they can not keep the faith of his ability and the feeling of self-worth. To protect self-worth, some students are motivated to avoid failure all out, Even they may abandon pursuing success.The relation between ability and effort is covariate. If your ability is high, you can acquire success with a little effort. On the contrary, if your ability is low, you need afford great effort to acquire success. So we can deduce people's ability on the basis of his effort and the following outcome. If one afforded great effort, but he failed, he can not avoid the negative evaluation of his ability. When anticipating the possible failure, they will abandon effort. Because effort and failure threat his self-concept of ability. Covington regard such withdraw behavior as "self-worth protection strategy"Self-handicapping is one of self-worth protection strategy. Self-handicapping means that people set handicaps on his way to success consciously or unconsciously, So they can control other people's attribution on his ability. The research on self-handicapping have achieved great success, however, in domestic, there are few research in this field. So this research aims to get to know the situation of self-handicapping in high school, to validate whether the conclusion on self-handicapping research in foreign country can be accepted in our country .At the same time, we use some motivation variables simultaneously to predict self-handicapping , So we can draw a delicate conclusion, and compare the role of each variable to self-handicapping. Moreover, we can reveal the dynamic mechanism lurking in self-handicapping.The 258 subjects are high school students. We adopt the questionnaires toexplore the relationships between self-handicapping and self-esteem, achievement motivation and achievement goal. The results show that:(1) there is no significant difference between male students and female students. (2) Self-handicapping in the senior high grade is more than junior high school. There is no significant difference among senior high school student. However, there are differences in junior high school student. Students of grade two and grade three handicaps more than students of grade one (3) Low achievement students acquire more self-handicapping than the high achievement students.(4) The students with low self-esteem are prone to self-handicapping more than the students with high self-esteem.(5) The motivation of avoid failure is a significant positive predicator of self-handicapping.(6) The achievement -avoid goal is a significant positive predicator of self-handicapping . The master goal is a significant negative predicator of self-handicapping. What's more, the achievement-avoid goal have greater predicator power than the master goal. There is no significant relation between self-handicapping and achievement -approach goal. (7) Self-deprecate and motivation-avoid failure have greater predicator power than other variables in research. They both are significant positive predicator of self-handicapping.