Abstract: Social supports are the perceived respect, love and help from others, such as parents, teachers or peers. Currently, the mechanism how the social supports have impact on achievement is still open to question. The aims of the study was to explore the influence of different social supports (specifically, from parents, teachers and peers) on academic achievement and to test the mediating effect of academic self-concept between them. Meanwhile, we also checked if the mediating effect varied between boys and girls. 2519 eighth-grade students from 9 junior middle schools in Hangzhou, China were required to finish social supports and academic self concept scales and standard Chinese and Maths achievement tests. The stepwise regression was used to determine the most important support resources among parents, teachers and peers. The result revealed that peers support could predict academic achievement significantly (β=.36, p<. 001) and the parents’ and teachers’ supports could not enter the equation, which were stable within both girls and boys. Given that the parents’ and teachers’ support could not predict academic achievement when controlling the peers’ support, we only consider peers’ support when building mediating model. We built the regressions of academic self concept on peers’ support and the regression of academic achievement on academic self concept and peers’ support separately. Also, we repeated the mediating effect analysis within boys and girls group separately. The results showed that (1) peers’ support could predict academic achievement significantly (β=.72, p<.001) but it could not predict academic achievement (β=.003, p>.05) when controlling academic self-concept; (2) no matter for boys or for girls, the peers’ support could predict academic achievement significantly (βmale=.71, p<.001; βfemale=.79, p<.001). However, when controlling academic self concept, the peers’ support could not predict academic achievement for boys (β= -.06, p>.05) but could predict academic achievement for girls (β=.10, p<.01). Conclusions: (1) For Eighth Graders, peers’ support was more important than parents’ and teachers’ support. (2) Academic self-concept was the mediator between social support and academic achievement. (3) For boys, the effect of social support on school achievement was fully mediated by academic self-concept; for girls, the effect of social support on school achievement was partially mediated by academic self-concept.

Key words: social support, academic achievement, academic self-concept, gender differences

摘要： 本研究对杭州市2519名初二学生进行调查，考察学业自我概念在社会支持对学习成绩预测中的中介作用及该中介作用的性别差异。结果表明：（1）相比父母和教师的支持，对于初二学生来讲，同伴支持对其学习成绩的影响更大。（2）学业自我概念在社会支持与学习成绩间起中介作用。（3）学业自我概念在社会支持与学习成绩之间的中介作用存在性别差异。对于男生群体，学业自我概念起完全中介作用；对于女生群体，起部分中介作用。

关键词: 社会支持, 学习成绩, 学业自我概念, 性别差异