The Impact Of Parental Autonomy Support On Secondary Vocational School Students Academic Engagement: The Effect Of Academic Self-efficacy And Its Intervention

As vocational and technical education,secondary vocational education has an Significant Status in China’s high school education,and cultivating high quality professional and technical talents is the top priority of teaching and learning.Secondary vocational students not only need to deal with the pressure of not succeeding to enter high school,the negative evaluation from the public,and the employment pressure and frustration worries they may face in the future.These realities also affect the academic performance of secondary school students,and even more so,the quality of secondary education as a whole.Learning engagement is a positive developmental resource in the academic field of adolescents,which can reflect the psychological activities of individuals in the learning process and,to some extent,their mental health.Previous studies have pointed out that secondary school students’ learning engagement is influenced by various factors,and parental autonomy support as a type of positive parenting is strongly associated with secondary school students’ academic performance.The present study focused on the mechanism of the role of academic engagement of secondary school students at the family parenting level and investigated whether academic self-efficacy interventions were effective in improving secondary school students’ academic engagement.Study1: To explore the relationship between secondary school students’ parental autonomy support,academic self-efficacy,and learning engagement,a questionnaire survey was conducted on 681 secondary school students from two vocational schools in Y city using the Parental Autonomy Support Scale,Academic Self-Efficacy Questionnaire,and Learning Engagement Scale.Study2: An academic self-efficacy group counseling intervention study aimed at improving the academic self-efficacy and learning engagement levels of secondary school students.An experimental method of 3(pre-test,post-test,follow-up test)× 2(experimental group,control group)mixed design was used to conduct a 2-month academic self-efficacy network group counseling intervention(8 sessions in total)for the experimental group,while the control group occurred under natural conditions.The findings of the study were as follows.1.secondary school students’ parental autonomy support,academic self-efficacy,and learning engagement were generally at moderate to high levels.2.The differences of parental autonomy support and academic commitment of secondary school students were not significant on demographic variables such as gender,whether they were only child and major;the differences of academic self-efficacy of secondary school students were significant on gender and only child,and not significant on major and birthplace.3.Parental autonomy support and academic commitment of secondary school students were significantly and positively correlated;parental autonomy support and academic self-efficacy were significantly and positively correlated;academic self-efficacy and academic commitment were significantly and positively correlated.4.The academic self-efficacy of secondary school students played a partly mediating role in parental autonomy support and learning engagement,and its mediating effect accounted for 70.30%.5.After the group counseling intervention,the post-test and follow-up test scores of the experimental group subjects were higher than the pre-test scores,and the differences were statistically significant(p<0.05),and the scores of the control group subjects at all three measurement times were not significantly different(p<0.05).Based on these results the following conclusions can be drawn.1.males are stronger than females in their sense of academic competence efficacy;non-only children are stronger than only children in their sense of academic behavior efficacy.2.Parental autonomy support not only directly predicts secondary school students’ academic engagement,but also indirectly predicts secondary school students’ academic engagement through the mediation of academic self-efficacy.3.Online group counseling on the theme of academic self-efficacy can not only improve secondary school students’ academic self-efficacy,but also indirectly improve secondary school students’ academic engagement,and the intervention effect has a certain degree of timeliness.