Middle School Students Perceived Social Support And Motivation To Learn The Relationship Between Research,

It is an important educational goal pursued by instructors to have the students recognize the value of knowledge and the importance of learning so as to work autonomously. Relevant researches suggest that the personal relationships of adolescents with their important others influence the development of their behavior motivation. Not only do the personal relationships offer them social information about their self, anticipation and values of others, rules and norms to particular problems, but also favorable conditions including tangible or moral social support for them to identify or internalize the social information and the values advocated by the society. Social support will widely influence people's stress, coding, and strategies to solve problems, and contribute to satisfy their social needs such as those for respect, affiliation (or relatedness), etc. as a prerequisite for them to take others' beliefs and values to their self, and internalize the relevant motivation. On the one hand , social support can help buffering the sense of crisis of adolescents as a group under stress to a certain extent so that they will try to fail and success freely; on the other hand, a sense of relatedness fostered by trust, respect, and concern will make them readily receptive to the ideas and beliefs of others including the values of learning upheld by their teachers and parents. It can be inferred that social support is an important factor to influence the internalization of academic motivation.Social support is a metaconstruct composed of support network resources, supportive behaviors, and support appraisals, and has two forms as actual social support and perceived social support which contains respectively various types such as emotional support, instrumental support, etc. Researches suggest that the measurement of perceived social support can predict one's psychophysical state more effectively than that of actual social support. Academic motivation is a complex construct which is often classified qualitatively, but Self-Determination Theory (SDT) describes motivation as a continuum with external regulation and intrinsic motivation as two ends, and then divides extrinsic motivation as four degrees which are embodied with four sorts of regulations: external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation, andintegrated regulation. The more internalized, the more extrinsic motivation will be similar to intrinsic motivation as to the effect on one's autonomy or self-determination. The internalization of motivation is a gradual process of socialization to integrate others' values into one's belief system. In our study we explored initially the relationships between perceived social support and the diverse degrees of motivation to detect the effect of social support on the internalization of motivation.Cognitive factors may mediate the influence of social support on academic motivation . In this study we selected academic self-efficacy as a cognitive variable to test whether or not it is a mediator in the relationship between social support and academic motivation to help understanding the relationship between social support and academic motivation..As stressful factors, conflict and punishment bring about a more controlling motivational context than social support does. In our study, the relationship between conflict or punishment and autonomous regulation was explored to contrast with the motivational function of social support.In this study three scales were used to measure a sample of 802 students selected from 4 middle schools by hierarchical random group sampling, and 766 available copies of scales were adopted to collect data which was processed with SPSS 10.0. Our study reveals that1. Social support perceived by adolescents is an effective predictor to the degree of the internalization of motivation.2. Perceived social support from mothers and teachers affect the internalization of motivation in adolescents positively. Academic self-efficacy mediates the effect of social support from...