Title: Students' psychological characteristics and its relationship with exhaustion, cynicism, and academic inefficacy

Authors: Mahtab Pouratashi; Asghar Zamani

Addresses: Institute for Research and Planning in Higher Education, Iran ' Institute for Research and Planning in Higher Education, Iran

Abstract: This paper highlights the relationship between students' psychological characteristics with exhaustion, cynicism, and academic inefficacy. A sample of 247 students from Iranian colleges of agriculture participated in this study. A questionnaire was used to obtain information on studied variables including demographic characteristics, goal orientation, intelligence beliefs, general self-efficacy beliefs, and so on. Reliability and validity of instrument were determined through opinions of professors and application of Cronbach's alpha. The findings revealed that there were significant correlations between students' psychological characteristics with exhaustion, cynicism, and academic inefficacy. Finally, the findings showed that the most dominant determinant of exhaustion was general self-efficacy belief with a total effect of −0.400. Incremental intelligence belief and entity intelligence belief had the most effects on cynicism and academic inefficacy, with a total effect of −0.437 and 0.448, respectively. The findings have implications for professors to use teaching methods that encourage effective engagement of students in learning and for counsellors to give useful educational and psychological advices to students.

Keywords: learning; student; higher education; exhaustion; cynicism; academic inefficacy; intelligence beliefs; goal orientation; general self-efficacy belief.

DOI: 10.1504/IJKL.2020.106647

International Journal of Knowledge and Learning, 2020 Vol.13 No.2, pp.98 - 109

Received: 24 Sep 2018
Accepted: 04 Mar 2019
Published online: 16 Apr 2020 *

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