The Effect Of Construal Levels On Time Management Disposition Of Senior High School Students

Construal levels refer to the perception of what will occur:the processes that give rise to the representation of the event itself. There are multiple levels of abstractness, high-level construals are abstract mental representations that extract the essential, core aspects of events: Low-level, concrete construals, in contrast, consist of rich, vivid, and specific detail.They emphasize subordinate (vs. superordinate) features of a situation, focusing on local (vs. global) perceptual elements, and processing information in a detailed-oriented(vs. holistic) manner. There is a mutual influence relationship between construal level and psychological distance (time distance, spatial distance, social distance, probability). Past researches has shown that concrete construals make undergraduates more likely to put their planes into practice, and fulfill the tasks in ahead, compared with abstract construals. Thus, construal levels have significant effect on time management behaviors. And as a kind of personality characteristic, time management disposition is reflected through a series of explicit activities,such as planning, goal setting, time distribution, the results of inspection, so it may be related to the construal levels.High school students are a special group, because they face a lot of pressure of entering to a higher school, and their main task is learning. The performance of the high school students’grades has a direct relationship with their time management behavior.Could the construal levels affect the time management disposition of high school students? And then change their learning behavior? In order to provide the students whose time management tendency is weaker with some time management strategy, and improve their ability in time management, this study is based on previous studies, selecting high school students as the research object, using questionnaire method and experimental method, to investigate the influence of abstract-concrete construal on students’time management disposition in high school.Our research is divided into two parts. In the questionnaire survey part, we make a random survey of250high school students to study the correlation between abstract and concrete construal levels and time management disposition by the Construal Level Questionnaire and Adolescence Time Management Disposition Scale.Then in the experimental part, we adopt " why/how"task to arouse subject’s abstract and concrete levels which is the classical paradigm of construal level theory in160high school students, to measure the subjects’ perceived time distance for the final exam in the future, and carry on the time management disposition scale measuring the subjects’time management disposition. At last, we explore the effects of abstract-concrete construal levels on time management disposition. Results suggest that:(1)The relationship between abstract-concrete construal levels and time management disposition is significant, and when participants’construal level is more concrete their scores on the time management disposition scale is higher. Neglective correlation is shown obviously among abstract-concrete levels、sense of time control and time efficacy.(2)The negative influence of abstract-concrete construal levels on time management disposition is significantly strong. Subjects in the concrete construal level group scored significantly higher than the abstract construal level group on the Adolescence Time Management Disposition Scale. Especially, abstract-concrete construal level has a significant impact on sense of time control.(3)Perceived time distance plays an intermediary role in the influence of abstract-concrete construal levels on time management disposition.(4)In addition, the research also founds that there is a significant grade difference in their construal level, that higher grade students prefer to choose high-level terms rather than low-level terms, but gender differences are not significant; High school students’ time management disposition has a significant difference in gender, but the grade difference is not significant.In a word, the results of the correlational research and the experimental study both show that abstract-concrete construals is close to the sense of time control of time management disposition. From this,we can see that concrete construals can effectively promote people to monitor time, enhance their time management tendency. Therefore, we should lead the high school students to adopt concrete construals as much as possible. This may help them overcome inertia, plan the time reasonably, and control time effectively.