The purpose of this study was to examine the moderating effects of mindfulness between high school girls’ perfectionism and test anxiety. The subjects of this study were 396 first, second and third grade girl students in high school located in Incheon. They were assessed by the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (FMPS), Multi-factor Mindfulness Scale for Adolescents (MMSA) and Test Anxiety Inventory-Korea (TAI-K). The collected data was analyzed using Pearson’s correlation analysis and hierarchical regression. The results which were significant in hierarchical regression were analyzed by using simple slope analysis. The results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, as the adaptive perfectionism and maladaptive perfectionism were increased, the level of test anxiety was increased. As the mindfulness was increased, the level of test anxiety was decreased. Second, the moderating effect of the mindfulness on the relationship between high school girls’ adaptive perfectionism and test anxiety was significant. In contrast, the moderating effect of the mindfulness on the maladaptive perfectionism and test anxiety was not significant. In conclusion, this study confirmed the important role of high school girls’ mindfulness to decrease test anxiety.
The Korean School Engagement Scale for Middle School Students (K-SES-M) is a 48-item self-report scale, which measures middle school students’ affective, behavioral, social, and academic engagement in school. Although the K-SES-M well reflects how Korean middle school students engage in school and is reliable and valid, there still remain psychometric issues to be resolved in the procedure of item development and quite a number of items restrict its use for both practical and research purposes. This study was conducted to develop a brief, psychometrically sound version of the K-SES-M using Rasch measurement model and to test its reliability and validity. Seven-hundred thirty-four students in Grades 7～9 completed the K-SES-M and criterion tests. The Rasch rating scale model was applied to each of the four school engagement factors. Results showed that a 4-point rating scale was more appropriate for the K-SES-M short form (K-SES-MS) than was the 5-point rating scale of the original K-SES-M. Based on item fit and item difficulty estimates for each of the four factors as well as differential item functioning analyses by gender for each item, 24 items were initially selected. The results from confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the fit of the first-order three-factor model consisting of affective engagement (7 items), behavioral engagement (8 items), and academic engagement (7 items) was reasonable. Thus, a 22-item short form of the K-SES-M was presented to meet the need for a measure that could be used for periodic monitoring of Korean middle school students’ engagement in school. The three factors of school engagement were found to have adequate construct reliability and internal consistency, and the K-SES-MS was found to have strong concurrent evidence. Finally, the use of the K-SES-MS, limitations of this study and suggestions for further research were discussed.
The purpose of this study is to closely examine teachers' competency in prevention and intervention of school violence based on students' experience. In order to achieve this, a total of 10 students (victims and perpetrators) who have experienced school violence and how it was handled by the school were interviewed. Afterwards, the interviews were analyzed by Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR). Results indicate that teachers' competency on school violence which were considered important by the students have been divided into a total of 4 areas and 16 categories. 4 areas are the following; awareness and attitudes of teachers toward school violence, procedures and methods of intervention by teachers, skills and competence of teachers in dealing with school violence issues, and ability of teachers in preventing school violence. According to the perspectives of students, it is necessary for teachers to have awareness and attitudes in acknowledging the seriousness of even the minor school violence cases and trying to resolve those cases actively and properly, to have methods to intervene in an educational way to follow the principles of the procedures, to have skills and competence to counsel, mediate and supervise relevant students, to establish positive relationships with students, and to have leadership and class managing skills to prevent school violence. This study is expected to provide fundamental research data to reinforce the competency of teachers in prevention and intervention of school violence. Especially this study is significant as it presents teachers' competency of differentiated intervention when dealing with victims and perpetrators at school. Also, based on the results of this study, the commonalities and the differences between the perspectives of students and the perspectives of teachers (from the preceding research) regarding the competency of teachers concerning school violence were discussed.
This study examined the relationship of social withdrawal subtypes (i.e., shy, unsociable, and regulated withdrawal) and perceived class climates(PCLs) with peer victimization(PV) and tested if the PCLs moderate the relations between social withdrawal subtypes and PV among 382 middle school boys and girls. As significant mean differences by gender, in which middle school girls had higher shy withdrawal and relational PV scores, were found, subsequent analyses were conducted separately for boys and girls. Correlational and hierarchical regression analyses revealed that shy and unsociable withdrawal and “controlled” and “laissez-faire” PCLs were positively associated with PV, whereas “autonomous” and “sociable” PCLs were negatively correlated with PV for both boys and girls. Regulated withdrawal was differently associated with PV by gender; regulated withdrawal significantly increased PV among girls, while it was not associated with direct and relational PV and associated with increased pro-social behaviors by peers among boys. Further, the moderating roles of controlled and laissez-fair PCLs on the relations between shy and unsociable withdrawal and PV were significant only for girls; socially withdrawn middle school girls who were shy or regulated tended to report increased PV experiences, especially as they perceived higher levels of controlled or laissez-faire classmate. Implications and limitations of our findings were discussed and suggestions for future study were provided.
The purpose of the current study was to investigate direct and indirect effect of cognitive flexibility on job and life satisfaction using a sample of Korean secondary school teachers. To do so, we applied Lent and Brown’s(2006, 2008) Social Cognitive Career Theory of Well-being. Specifically, we considered cognitive flexibility as personal trait variable, supervisory support as environmental support component, teachers’ self-efficacy and outcome expectation as person cognitive components and examined relationships among these variables and job and life satisfaction. Participants of study was 219 teachers working in middle and high schools in Seoul and Kyounggi area. We used structural equation modeling to test structural relationships among variables as well as direct and mediating paths. The result suggested that the hypothesized model provide a good fit to the data and 9 hypothesized paths of variables were found as significant. As hypothesized, job satisfaction was positively associated with overall life satisfaction, and cognitive flexibility was significantly related to job satisfaction via supervisory support, teachers self-efficacy, outcome expectation. Also, a direct path between cognitive flexibility and overall life satisfaction and indirect paths via supervisory support, teachers self-efficacy, outcome expectation, and job satisfaction were significant. Based on these results, we discussed implications for counseling and educational interventions that enhance teachers’ job and life satisfaction. Finally, we discussed limitations of the present study and implications for future research.
This study is both a concept mapping study and a validity study on the posttraumatic growth of adolescents. It aims to empirically determine major contributors to the posttraumatic growth of adolescents, as a concept mapping study and a validity study. First of all, the researchers of the first study, which was a concept mapping study on the posttraumatic growth of eight adolescents, conducted interviews with the subjects, who were reported to achieve the posttraumatic growth. The researchers summarized them into 38 core components, and created a concept map with multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis. The result showed that two dimensions consisted of cognitive․affective-behavioral engagement and personal-sociocultural factor. The four clusters were evaluated with 5-point Likert scales (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree) for subjects to show how important each cluster was to the individual’s context. The result referred to “willingness and responsibility of family members” as the most significant, followed by “the attainment of personal goals and a sense of achievement”, “acceptance and searching for meaning” and “social support and stress relief activities”. Next, the second study sought to validate factors of posttraumatic growth that were revealed in the concept mapping method through a new non-parametric statistics test. In this study, the 38 components of growth variables drawn from the previous concept mapping, were introduced to identify the importance to two groups, one of which consisted of an eight people of growth group, and the other an eight people of non-growth group. The result indicated that the growth group was ranked higher than the non-growth group, and the difference in the four clusters was significant between the two groups. Lastly, it presents the limitations of this study and the suggestion for further research.