Research on the psychological difficulties of high vocational students and intervention countermeasures

Представлен анализ психологических трудностей студентов высшего профессионального образования с точки зрения конкретизации их феноменологии и выявления внешних и внутренних причин их возникновения. Показаны возможные пути психологической помощи студентам в преодолении этих трудностей: открытие курсов психологического здоровья, проведение психологических тренингов и семинаров, психологическое консультирование.

Presently, the high vocational education is developing vigorously. By the end of 2010, the high vocational school number, the recruited student number, and the student number at schools separately occupied nearly 50%, 53% and 44.6% out of our national ordinary universities number, and still hastened the growth. But currently speaking, neither the education quality nor the talent cultivating quality is not as desired. So some high vocational students are confused and puzzled to their own life localization and the future career development direction, and the campus crisis phenomena of being tired of study, temporary leaving study, puppy love, and suicide are common, and the students with psychological problems are increasing progressively year by year. This article plans to analyze the causes and representation of high vocational students' psychological difficulties from the teaching and education practice of high vocational school and form the students' psychology demand structure and social factors leading to psychological problems, and brings forward intervention countermeasure.

Summarizing the high vocational students’ psychological difficulty phenomena. In the psychological health study, the psychological illness is divided into three ranks such as psychological difficulty, psychological barrier and psychological disease. The psychological difficulty of the students at school generally refers to the slight psychological problem led by insufficient experience or improper education, and has the partial influence to the students’ study, life, human communication and so on at school [1].

In 2007, the guangzhou Engineering Technology Vocation College selected 1614 new students recruited in 2007 and 1716 students enrolled in 2006 to have a psychological health test. In the students, the population that has psychological illness and needs to screen respectively is 740 and 653, which accounts for 43.12% and 40.4 respectively in the students of 2006 and 2007. The two proportions showed fully that a quite big part of high vocational students have psychological problems [9].

The concrete representations of the psychological difficulty of high vocational students:

1. The interpersonal relationship is not harmonious. After entering the high vocational colleges and universities, on the on hand, the students no longer have meticulous cares from their teachers and parents; On the other hand, the difference of economic level, educational background, life habits and customs, language exchange and so on also makes the contact between schoolmates relatively difficult. If lacking some es­sential contact methods and skills and not being able to establish actively a new kind of relations between schoolmates or between teachers and students, an intense interpersonal relationship will possibly form.

1                    Study and employment pressures. High vocational students' study and employment always connect closely with each other.After entering their school, the students will change their future expectation gradually to the employment reality, and will ponder own career development from the perspective of their occupation preparation. If the school cannot give the students essential occupational psychology guidance and a quite reasonable professional profession plan and design, they will bring forward psychological puzzles during the process of pondering and balance. Moreover, the enrollment system characteristics of Chinese college entrance examination cause the specialty that a part of students cannot choose their favourite subject, but also many students cannot transform their old study ways promptly, and seek initiatively to establishe their new study mentality and methods. So it is very easy for them to produce the boredom moods and the contradiction behaviors in their study.

2                    Amativeness emotion crisis. The age of high vocational students is between 18 to 22 years old, and their psychological development is in transition-period of rapid mature but not complete mature, namely is in the final critical period of «psychologically breast giving up» called by Holling Worth, an American psychologist. This is “the hurricane time” of their life development, which is a development phase that has a close inevitable relationship with the mood tumult and spirit confusion [7]. The love of parents cannot be with the students frequently, so «love» becomes the substitute of the emotion void in their puberty. The lovers in pair also become a unique scenery in the university campus. love not only has the happiness, but also goes with passive mood experience such as sorrow, pain, despair, cafard, nihility and so on. If it is processed improperly, it will affect their study, life and the physical and moral integrity, and even cause violent behaviors such as the suicide, the homicide and so on . This is also one of the areas in which high vocational students produce psychological harassment most easily.

3                    Social evaluation question. All kinds of rewards, examination and competition can bring the reputations to a part of students during school period. For example, they like to be the etiquette members and volunteers serving certain social activities; Because of their excellent representation, they can join the party outstandingly, obtain the scholarship, and be selected as the outstanding student cadres; Attending each great skill game, they obtain position and so on. All these can give the profound influence to their school life and future employment prospect, and may also cause the psychological harassment since some of them haggle over the benefit, success and failure. Moreover, the minority students also have psychologi­cal problems caused by the social adaptation difficulty, the polarization of the rich and the poor, the belief flaw, the thunderbolt and so on, which is no longer summarized here.

 

The analysis of formation cause of high vocational students’ psychological difficulty pheno­mena. Firstly, the influence of external factors. The difference between the student raising patterns in the high vocational colleges and in the ordinary institutions gives rise to the multiplicity and the complexity of high vocational students’ psychological difficulty condition. Most of the high vocational colleges and universities come from the merge or the promotion of the middle vocational school, and their teachers’ cultural accomplishment, competence level, education idea, management pattern, teaching method have great differences; The source of students is complex; The subjects cannot be distinguished clearly. All these have created certain puzzles to the student psychology.

Secondly, the influence of internal factors. Because of the difference between the study level, adaptiveness, overall quality of the subject students, the students has some psychological problems:

1. The collision between ideal and reality gives rise to contradictory setback. The actual condition and the environment of high vocational students’ study, work, life, human relations and so on can have the deviation inevitably with the their self-expectation ideal and target. Facing the setbacks, they are greatly disappointed frequently.

 

1.       The imperfect self-awareness gives rise to psychological puzzles. The favourable self-awareness and self-concept based on the self-respect and self-confident are the psychological foundation for a person to deal with the life events. One research in China indicated that the perfect degree of the university student self-awareness assumes the inverse correlation with their psychological puzzle degree. The more perfect their self-awareness is, the less psychological puzzles they have; Or vice versa [6]. In many cases of high vocational colleges, the students' psychological puzzles mostly have the relationship with the imperfect self-awareness. Each high vocational student is unable to be separated from processing each kind of environment questions independently. If they cannot know and appraise themselves objectively, carry on the self-localization accurately, integrate various aspects of information independently and the contradiction between experiences and feelings well, the defects existing in the self-awareness developing process will become the barrier that prevents high vocational students from adapting to college life and their self development, and inevitably make the production of all kinds of psychological puzzle phenomena.

2.       The cognition deviation causes the bad mood experience. It is the representation for whether a person has the good cognitive capacity that if he or she can treat and analyze questions objectively, ponder reasonably, impartially and without extremes. The high vocational students have different study experience levels, family backgrounds, living conditions, their own experience. Some students always like insisting on taking their own wishes as the starting points, and some students actually like drawing conclusions from a part, and processing questions with unreasonable thinking modes, so they have the bad mood experiences.

3.       The defective strategies cause the psychological barriers. The campus life of high vocational colleges set many requests to the students. However, the author, through the observation, has understood that the strategies, dealing with all kinds of campus events, of a very big part of students is not very symmetric to the requests raised by campus life. They cannot effectively and positively face various pressures and keep their mentality balanced, and their bodies and minds are in one kind of tight stress condition frequently, thus they have produced the psychological barriers.

 

The psychological intervention countermeasures to the high vocational students. The psychological intervention is, under the psychology theory instruction, to exert the strategical influence to the psychological health questions and behaviors of individual or community, and to make them have the directional anticipated target changes [4].

1. Open psychologically healthy required course. The psychological health teaching has more and more been being taken serious as the important means of school psychology intervention. Following Zhejiang University that firstly opened psychophylaxis course to the students in China in February, 1987, some a hundred domestic universities has also opened the course. Because it has the broad intervention surface, is relatively systematic, emphasizes development, and so on, the course has produced the good psychological education results [2].

After the matriculation, since they cannot adapt the university life well, many students feel themselves inferior and lonely. Therefore, the high vocational colleges and universities should, through opening the psychophylaxis course and providing psychological advisory staffs, help the student to realize the difference between the universities and middle schools, enhance the student's capacity when facing the difficulties and challenges, and let them know through which ways can they gain the effective help.

Pay great attention to developing students' self potential, promoting their self-value, and daring to undertake the responsibility. Educate them to respect the life value and the right of subsistence, to learn to appreciate other people, to respect individual difference, to coexist harmoniously with the human. Therefore, it is especially important to the students to make psychophylaxis a requested course.

2. Carrying on the psychological guidance and training. The basic principle of psychological guid­ance is that helping others is to help yourself, and that given “fishing”, the students can enjoy it in their whole life long [8]. The psychological training activity may help the students to learn adjust themselves and to adapt the campus rules better.

The high vocational colleges and universities may depend upon the development of planed, target-oriented all kinds of psychological guidance and training activity with special subject to let the students participate in richly colorful activities such as the psychological adjustment method training, the self-confidence training, the language performance training, the human communication training, the mood control training, the potential development training and so on, and upon adopting the vivid interesting ways such as the lecture, appreciating the telecine, the game, the team experience, the roll play, the symposium or the debating contests and so on, to improve their own all kinds of abilities.

3. Developing psychological consultation and intervention. The development of psychological consultation is also an important component of psychological health education in high vocational colleges and universities. The psychological consultation is not to solve visitors’ problems directly, but to promote visitors’ self-growth through the consultation, and to help them to solve the problems by themselves. Therefore, the psychological consultation is the process from the shallow to the deep, and from outside to inside, and its initial period effect is the symptom improvement, and the intermediate stage effect is the behavior change, and the later period effect is the personality consummation [3].

The high vocational colleges and universities developing group psychological consultation activities may be through the ways such as running lectures, subject class meeting, subject Sharon, openning propaganda column, video watching, and so on, and regularly propagandize the psychological health knowledge to the school students, and build the strong psychological health education atmosphere [5].

The psychological consultation aiming at individual student is the best way of psychological intervention effect. The high vocational colleges and universities should make a evaluation to the new students’psychological health every year. Through screening, the students should be discovered early who have depressed, anxious, self-abased, extreme, nervous, hot tempered, rich in attack tendency character­istics; Moreover, we must also pay special attention to the students who have bad academic records, low subject satisfaction degree, introversive characters, establish the psychological file for them, especially dredge and follow the track of the them, set up talks promptly, and prevent accidents before they occur.

In summary, the high vocational colleges and universities should, according to the school students' psychologicay health condition, construct educational model that fits the student characteristics. We should not only emphasize the social functions of vocational education in the development of human resources, social economy and so, but also pay attention to the intrinsic potential with which vocational education excavates student individuality fully, and the influential role that urges human individuality development. We should construct “the multi-level crossing bridge” between department and school, teacher and student, student and student, which can achieve the good communication, open positive healthy life training course to make it fuse mutually with the school psychology advisory service and the psychological intervention mechanism, and set up the harmonious campus humanities environment diligently. The school should pay attention to the high vocational students’ psychological demand fully, excavate students’ non-intelligence factor in every way, improve students’ overall quality, educate them to set up the positive life belief, let their pressure release effectively, solve their psychological difficulty promptly. So a large quantities of high skill professionals can be trained for our society, who have the outstanding vocational skills, the complete overall quality, the good psychological balance ability, and can adapt the social fast development changes.

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