The Influence Of Academic Pressure On Academic Procrastination Of Junior High School Students:The Mediating Effect Of Effortful Control And Its Intervention

Academic procrastination is a common problem in contemporary junior high school students.Academic procrastination could often lead to the failure to complete the academic task in a specified time,or even if they can complete the task,the start time would be delayed,so that they could not achieve the expected learning effect.What’s more,academic procrastination often causes negative emotions like anxiety and remorse.As a result,long-term academic procrastination would affect students’ physical and mental health,it could also affect their studying performance.With the intensification of social competition,students’ academic pressure is also increasing.According to various study results,it reveals that academic pressure could be one of the reasons for academic procrastination,which means students under high pressure are easy to procrastinate their study.In addition,effortful control,the core of self-regulation,can regulate attention,restrain bad behaviors and emotions,so it should be able to effectively reduce students’ academic procrastination.Meanwhile the increase of academic pressure would cause the loss of individual effortful control.It could be seen that there is a close relationship between academic pressure,academic procrastination,and effortful control,however,there is little direct research on the relationship between the three.Therefore,this study tries to probe the relationship between these three variables.Furthermore,investigate the effect of the group intervention of effortful control.The study is mainly divided into two parts:Study 1 used questionnaire survey method to investigate academic pressure,academic procrastination,and effortful control in one of junior high school in Shanghai,and finally got 436 valid questionnaires.Based on the analysis,study 1 tries to explore the relationship between academic stress,academic procrastination,and effortful control,as well as the mediating effect of effortful control in predicting the relationship between academic pressure and academic procrastination.Study 2,based on study 1,chose 24 students in grade 8 with high degree of academic procrastination and low level of effortful control.Randomly divided them into three groups,8 students per group.The three groups were experimental group,control group I and control group II.Conducted effortful control group intervention for experimental group,English learning group intervention for control group I,and for control group II did not do any intervention.The purpose of study 2 is to test the effect of effortful control group guidance on improving the level of effortful control and reducing the degree of academic procrastination of junior high school students.The study results show that:(1)For junior high school students,39.22% reported higher academic procrastination,which means that academic procrastination is relatively a common phenomenon.(2)For middle school students,academic pressure is significantly positive correlated with academic procrastination;negative correlated with effortful control Significantly;Academic procrastination and effortful control is Significantly negative correlated.(3)Effortful control plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between academic stress and academic procrastination.(4)Effortful control group guidance can significantly enhance junior high school students’ effortful control and reduce academic procrastination.The results are conducive to understanding the influence of academic stress on academic procrastination from the perspective of effortful control and self-regulation depletion theory.And the non-limit willpower belief theory is incorporated into the intervention research of effortful control,which provides an important reference for educators to improve students’ effortful control and reduce procrastination.