The Relationship Between Perfectionism, Implicit Theories Of Intelligence And Academic Achievement In Junior High School Students

How to improve the academic performance is the most concerned topic among junior highschool students. Instead of the intelligence factors, now the researchers focus on thenon-intelligence factors such as personality, motivation, will and emotion. Perfectionism is astable personality trait which has profound influence on people’s emotion, behavior and qualityof life. Human change themselves constantly and try to be excellent in order to better adapt tolife. The essence of the motivation is called perfectionism. Perfectionism is divided into adaptiveperfectionism and maladaptive perfectionism. The content of implicit theories of intelligence isthat students hold different ideas about the nature of their intelligence. Entity theorists believethat their intelligence is fixed that cannot be developed. Incremental theorists believe that theirintelligence is malleable via learning. The previous researches showed that perfectionism andimplicit theory of intelligence were significantly related to academic performance. No researches,however, explore the relationship between perfectionism (personality trait) and implicit theory ofintelligence (self-cognition) and combine perfectionism and implicit theory of intelligence toexplore their influence on academic achievement. Besides, personality and self-cognition arehighly developed in junior high school and gradually have important impact on students’academic achievement. So junior high school students are picked as participants to discuss therelationship between perfectionism implicit theory of intelligence and academic achievement.Based on the theoretical research, this passage offered some helpful suggestions for parents andteachers.560students in grades7-9(totally18classes) from a junior high school in Jinan participatedin this study. The Chinese Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (CFMPS), which arerevised by ZiFei and ZhouXu, was used to measure the perfectionism of adolescents. Theimplicit theory of intelligence questionnaire, which is drew up by Dweck and revised by JinxiaZhao, was used to measure implicit theory of intelligence of participants. The total scoresof all subjects in last exam were collected and transformed into Z scores, which stood for theacademic achievement of participants. The main conclusions are as follows:1There was only gender difference in Organization dimension of perfectionism of junior highschool students: Girl’s organization was significantly higher than boy’s. There were no genderdifference and sibling difference in implicit theory of intelligence of junior high school students.The gender difference and sibling difference were significant in academic achievement of juniorhigh school students: girl’s academic achievement was significantly higher than boy’s; only-childstudent’s academic achievement was significantly higher than non-only child student’s.2Organization and personal standards shared significant and positive correlations with academicachievement. Concern over mistakes and doubts about actions were negatively correlated withacademic achievement. Implicit theory of intelligence shared significant and negativecorrelations with academic achievement. Concern over mistakes, parental expectation, doubtsabout actions shared significant and positive correlations with implicit theory of intelligence.3Implicit theory of intelligence partially mediates the relationship between concern overmistakes, personal standards and academic achievement. Implicit theory of intelligence totallymediates the relationship between doubts about actions and academic achievement.