Abstract:

High school students are generally believed not to enjoy a high level of physical and mental health and happiness due to the pressure of the College Entrance Examination. This phenomenon has attracted more and more attention from society, schools and families. Although many policies and measures for reducing burdens and stimulating students’ interest have already been implemented, they have not achieved the expected results, indicating that there may be more complicated relationships between learning motivation, learning pressure and subjective well-being than simple correlation. Using the online questionnaire to survey more than 14,000 high school students from a province in east China, the piecewise regression model (PRM) was used to explore the possible thresholds of learning motivation and learning pressure. The results show that learning motivation has more influence on students’ subjective well-being than learning pressure; and high school students with high learning motivation can feel the happiness of active learning. For high school students, it needs to be targeted to effectively improve the subjective well-being of students with higher learning pressure. Besides, it is necessary to focus on the academic development and healthy growth of high school students whose learning motivation and pressure are not up to standard.

Key words: subjective well-being, learning motivation, learning pressure, high school students, threshold