A Causal Explanation of Students' Academic Avoidance Based on Mindfulness and Academic Self-Concept

The aim of this study was to provide a causal explanation of students' academic avoidance based on their mindfulness and academic selfconcept. The statistical population of the study included high school students in Zarghan City, Fars Province, Iran, who were studying in the academic year 2019-2020. From the study population, 348 students, i.e. 125 boys and 223 girls, were selected based on cluster sampling. The Participants, then, filled out the Adolescent and Adult Mindfulness Scale (Droutman et al., 2018), the Academic Avoidance Questionnaire (Khormaei & Saleh Ardestani, 2017), and the Academic Self-concept Checklist (Chen & Thompson's, 2004). The results indicated that the direct effect of mindfulness on academic avoidance was not statistically significant. However, mindfulness had a statistically significant effect on academic self-concept and indirectly, through the mediating effect of academic self-concept, affected academic avoidance, too. The overall results of this study showed that mindfulness and academic self-concept can explain academic avoidance. It can be concluded that to reduce students' academic avoidance, their mindfulness and academic selfconcept should be taken into consideration.