Middle School Students' Time Perspective And Research And Achievements Associated Characteristics

Time perspective is an individual's trait of time cognition, time experience and behavior (or behavioral tendency) towards time, and is a relatively stable individual variable. Material time, immutable, non-stored and non-replaced, but mental time-time perspective differs much from one and another, for there is great difference among individuals' ability of understanding time, experiencing time, and doing according to time. Time perspective is closely related to the development, because whether one can effectively summarize the experience and lesson of the past, whether one can seize the opportunity, and whether one can make the future plan and realize it play a key role in one's lifetime.In recent years, our country has begun to introduce time perspective and apply it for the local research, but the research was single, and the empirical results were little. In this context, this study started. In this study, drawing-circle acted as projection test and time experience questionnaire made by ourselves were used to discover the time perspective characteristics of middle school students;and at the same time students' achievement goals and academic performance were got. With all these above, we made a preliminary analysis of the relationship among time perspective, achievement goal and academic performance.The study included three tests: firstly 260 students were tested in order to make explorative factor analysis, reliability and validity analysis;secondly data collected from 596 students were used to make confirmatory factor analysis and time-experience characteristic analysis;thirdly data gathered from 239 students were used to analysis the cognitive characteristics of time perspective and probe into the relationship among time perspective, achievement and academic performance.The results were showed:1. The time experience questionnaire for middle school students had good reliability and validity, and it could be used to test the time experience of middle school students in our cultural background.2. The study showed that, in time perspective cognition contents, most students respectively belonged to the future disposal, the future direction and the separating time type. There were no significant gender differences among the time orientation, the time dominance and the time relevance;there were grade differences in the time relevance. In time perspective emotional contents, the time experience of students was positive, the gender differences were not significant, and the grade differences were significant;in all the four dimensions of time experience there had significant grade differences, but only in the evaluation of the past dimension there had gender difference, for the boys' assessments of the past were higher than the girls'.3. There was a significant relation between the time experience and the achievement goal of the middle school students, the more positive of time experience, the more reasonable of achievement goal;the academic performance of students had significant differences in time relevance, the stronger of the time relevance, the higher of academic performance.At last, aimed to do some help to the future researches, we analyzed the methods, the results, the problems and the future developments of this study.