Vocational Students' Future Time Perspective And Its Association With Motivation

Future time perspective is a personality trait that the individual plans, organizes future goals, expects to explain and construct future with the use of implicit theories of time at present. It is expressed as individual social development, self development, particularly cognitive, emotional and behavioral tendencies towards the possibility of self-development, which is actually self-consciousness of possible future ego. Purpose of this study is to explore the general condition of vocational students'future time perspective and its relations to motivation in order to arouse people's great attention to vocational students'future time perspective and cany out an extensive research in this area,and provide a theoretical basis for the practice of education.This research takes 324 vocational students as the subjects,exploring the relationship between future time perspective and motivation by questionnaire. Based on the comprehensive analysis of results of this research,we get conclusions as follows:(1) Compared with previous studies, vocational students'future time perspective show a downward trend overall. There are significant gender and grade differences among vocational students'future time perspective. Boys are significantly higher than girls, and Freshmen are significantly higher than Sophomores and Junior students, which shows a downward trend with grade increasing. Students from different majors differ not significantly. Students from urban and rural areas also differ not significantly.(2) There are significant correlations between vocational students'future time perspective and motivation, vocational students'future time perspective are also significantly correlated to six dimensions of motivation, and vice versa.(3) From the stepwise regression analysis, we find that self-efficacy, intrinsic goals, and learning anxiety play a significant role in predicting future time perspective, which first entered the regression equation is self-efficacy, followed by internal goals. Learning anxiety play a negative role in predicting future time perspective.