Students' in- and after-school optimal experience: Intensive longitudinal data with variable-centered and person-centered analyses

Autor: Cheng, Chao-Yang, 鄭朝陽
Rok vydání: 2016
Druh dokumentu: 學位論文 ; thesis
Popis: 104
Csikszentmihalyi (1975) identified flow, or optimal experience, “as a complex and highly structured state of deep involvement, absorption, and enjoyment”. Flow experience typically occurs when a person focuses on a set of clear goals that require appropriate skills. Many people describe such experience of effortless feeling as the best moments of their lives, saying, “It was like floating” or “I was carried by the flow.” The term “flow”, or “optimal experience,” was therefore proposed. Flow typically occurs in the moments of activities and is highly influenced by external environments. Thus, previous researchers regard flow as a momentary experience, instead of a stable of personality (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). However, past studies have proved that some of individuals exactly often perceive the experience and further suggested that individual differences of flow existed. More specifically, the persons who have high frequency of flow have the personality of autotelic, which is associated with “a general curiosity and interest in life, persistence, low self-centeredness, and high creativity than others” (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002). However, most previous flow research has focused on adult experts’ sense of such effortless cognition/action in performing professional works or has examined teenagers’ optimal experience in daily life situations in western countries. Few but some studies have explored students’ optimal experience in high-school and elementary classroom settings (e.g., Schweinle, Meyer, & Turner, 2006; Schweinle et al., 2008). To our knowledge, there is also a lack of flow research conducted in Taiwan school environments. This research aims to explore the flow in learning environments and attempts to expand the flow theory, modify measuring methods, and explore students’ optimal experience. In terms of relevant theories, the diverse operational definitions of flow have caused the fundamental problem of flow research. The present research defined optimal experience as a functional state assessed by students’ self-ratings of concentration, time distortion, satisfaction, and enjoyment in each specific class. The operational definition of flow used in the research is applicable not only to learning environments but also especially to elementary school students with younger ages. In addition, previous literature regarding research methods (e.g., Bradburn, Sudman, & Wansink, 2004) has criticized that traditional survey methods may have memory biases, where people may overestimate or underestimated their momentary experience. Optimal experience is the high engagement in an activity and it is necessary to ensure that students could continue to maintain such participation in their activities while collecting data. Therefore, a less disruptive data collecting method is more suitable for its momentary feature. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM; Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004b) has been developed recently and the current research consider that the use of the DRM in school settings is better than experience sampling method (ESM), which is well-known for its advantage to capture the moments when students were experiencing flow. The DRM is an improved survey method in order to explore how people plan their lives to spend their time and how they experience the various activities. Every morning, before participants engage in any activities, they are asked to recall the activities from the preceding day by generating a sequence of episodes in their diaries, e.g., “7: 30 to 8: 00 - waking up and cleaning” and “8:10 to 9:00 - participation of first-lesson in school.” After producing a diary consisting of contiguous episodes over the course of a day, the perceptual and contextual dimensions in each episode could be analyzed. Differing from traditional longitudinal data, which is gathered across longer time frame (e.g., cross-semester, cross-year) and/or by questionnaire, the use of the DRM includes some useful characteristics, such as gathering intensive longitudinal (Conner & Lehman, 2012), panel (repeat many times from the same one), and repeat-measured data. The research consists of three studies and uses the DRM to collect intensive longitudinal data. The research recruited elementary school (N = 191) and college (N = 271) students to investigate students’ cognitive and affective experiences at school and out-of-school time. All the three studies capture the moments across school subjects taught with various instructional methods and across after-school daily activities. The research then uses the complementary approaches in order to clarify the relative contribution of interactions among students’ momentary experiences, contextual environments, and traits in specific activities so that both Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM; variable-centered approach) and Latent Profile Analysis (LPA; person-centered approach) are performed. Study One has provided a relatively comprehensive analysis of optimal experience in across-course situations by conducting Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM). In three random days, 147 5th-graders answered questionnaires for each episode in the previous day; then, 2,288 episodes were collected. The episode data in school-day courses, where elementary school students perceived positive and negative subjective experience, were used in this study. These following viewpoints were considered in the analysis of HLM. Firstly, the perceptual factor of flow conditions was adopted in the episode situations. Another major contextual factor of the episode situations were instructional strategies. Finally, HLM was conducted to explore how the flow conditions and the instructional methods simultaneously impacted optimal experience while the individual level factors were controlled. The results showed that elementary school students perceived better quality of optimal experience during break time versus in activity, seat work, or lecture. Optimal experience varied much more across class episodes than among individuals. Surprisingly, optimal experience was higher when students perceived having high skill but experiencing low challenge. Four additional flow conditions were more effective than instructional methods and primary flow conditions proposed in previous research, in terms of the prediction of optimal experience. The purpose of Study Two aims to use a multilevel mediation model to explore how motivation influenced flow conditions and optimal experience during after-school activities and further discussed the relationship between a trait-like motivation theory (i.e., self-determination theory) and flow theory. The current study, firstly, assumes that students’ after-school activities consist of four daily activities, which are learning, active leisure, passive leisure, and maintenance. Then, the current study uses the multilevel mediation model to explore whether students’ optimal experience (episode level rather than individual level) would be influenced by flow conditions (episode-level) and self-determination motivation (individual-level). Moreover, a total of 191 5th-graders reported 2,286 episodes by the DRM. The current study found that flow conditions in after-school active leisure significantly and completely mediated the effect of self-determination motivation on optimal experience. Students with higher self-determined motivation had better understanding about how to fully involve in active leisure, so that they could further experience effortless feeling as optimal experience of their activities. The results also indicated that students’ self-determination motivation had no significant indirect effect when students participated in maintenance. The purpose of Study Three aims to use the latent profile analysis (LPA) to explore the college students with autotelic tendency. The main reason of using college students sample is that college students have more opportunities to plain and organize their daily schedules. This study differs from the others (variable-centered approach) because this is a person-centered study and focus on individual differences and consequences. The study uses the LPA to determine the optimal group numbers and cluster the variables of optimal experience and flow conditions, moods, and frequency in each daily activity in order to figure out homogeneous groups. Then, this study compares the indictors of autotelic tendency among the groups. A total of 271 college students reported 5,258 episodes by the DRM. The LPA results suggested three distinct profiles labeled median, staying in comfort-zone and seeking for meaningful-life. After comparing the indicators of autotelic tendency of each group, the author found that the students in the median group and staying in comfort-zone group provided similar results. However, the main difference between the median group and staying in comfort-zone group was that the staying in comfort-zone group students significantly had better life satisfaction than median group. In terms of the analysis of autotelic tendency of the seeking for meaningful-life group, the results indicated that students in this group had high life satisfaction and were willing to face and accept different kinds of challenges in their life. The evidences also showed that the students in the seeking for meaningful-life group could perceive and recognize the transfers among different subjects of courses and were also eager to participate in productive activities (e.g., participations of after-school learning, part-time work, and research project). According to the results, the author suggests that the students in the seeking for meaningful-life group conformed to the characteristics of autotelic tendency.
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