Plan and Then Act: The Moderated Moderation Effects of Profession Identity and Action Control for Students at Arts Universities during the Career Development Process

Abstract

Preservice teachers at universities of arts have more than 10 years of professional training before admission, but in their senior year, they face the pressure of the graduation exhibition and performances and the teacher certification examination at the same time. This process is dissimilar to that for preservice teachers at general universities. Such a difference, however, has not been taken seriously in the past. In order to avoid burnout, preservice teachers at universities of arts, when they are under the pressure of limited time, may choose to identify with the departments they are more familiar with for their future careers, rather than identifying with their educational program, in order to increase hope for their career and reduce the chance of burnout. In addition, we believe that the use of action control/state control would also show different adaptation situations in the face of pressure. Therefore, this study focuses on the role of profession identity and action control as moderating variables in the process of becoming preservice teachers at arts universities. We recruited 304 art-major preservice teachers to establish a path model to explore their future time perspective and grit, detecting how the mediation of career decision self-efficacy affects learning burnout and career hope. Secondly, we inspected the moderating effect of profession identity and action control on learning burnout and career hope. We found that profession identity moderates the relationships between future time perspective and career decision self-efficacy as well as between career decision self-efficacy and learning burnout, all of which exhibited ordinal interactions. Furthermore, preservice teachers with high decision-making efficacy had lower burnout than those with low efficacy, but the high-efficacy advantage in preservice teachers under state control in reducing burnout would disappear. Lastly, although professional identification was important, action control regulated the relationship between career decision self-efficacy and learning burnout with ordinal interaction; that is, action control could effectively reduce their learning burnout.