FTP is defined, generally, as the extent and the way of anticipation and integration of the psychological present life-space to the future (Husman and Lens, 1999; Janeiro et al., 2017; Simons et al., 2004). People with strong FTP tend to consider the future consequences of the present activities.

Understanding the temporal linkage is not easy for children as they value and live in a sense of the present feelings (Montague-Smith, 2014). Some considered children are less cognitively capable of understanding the concept of “future”, and, hence, it is unnecessary to relate FTP with children development (Mello and Worrell, 2015). In contrast, Bembenutty and Karabenick (2004) argued that FTP in children was associated with delay gratification, in which students with shorter FTP perceived the time interval longer than those with longer FTP and are less willing to delay gratification.

Despite the dispositional nature of time perspectives, their effects on individuals can be influenced by the environment (Zimbardo and Boyd, 1999). In educational settings, the instructional context (e.g., learning objectives, learning activities, assessment tasks) is the most relevant environmental factor that influences academic outcomes. Environmental cues may have a heavier weight among children as their FTP are still in development (Shipley, 2014). If an environment provides an obvious cue for them to link the present behavior, children with stronger FTP may be able to anticipate the consequences of the present-time behaviors in learning and persist in it.

Walsh and Holland (1992) proposed that personality and environment congruence is associated with higher levels of educational stability, satisfaction, and achievement. Eccles et al. (1993) put the paradigm into a developmental perspective, in which children learn the best when the environment provides sufficient challenges that match with the children’s current stage of maturity. Consistent with the person-environment fit paradigm, negative motivations were resulted when individuals feel that the environment did not fit their needs (Murayama and Elliot, 2009). On the other hand, the individuals were more likely to develop a certain intention to learn if the environment matched the disposition of the individuals (Feldman et al., 2001).

The person-environment model may be extended to time perspectives. In health psychology, individuals’ time perspective could moderate the effects of temporally framed messages on behavioral intentions of adequate sleep (Guan and So, 2020), health screening (Orbell and Hagger, 2006) and sunscreen use (Orbell and Kyriakaki, 2008), and the cognitive responses on exercise (Dimmock et al., 2013). In the education domain, Zimbardo and Boyd (1999) suggested that high dropout rates among students of low socioeconomic status at all levels of schooling were likely to be a result of “time perspective discordance” that the environment did not fit with their time perspectives. Children from families where present-time perspective predominate would be less ready to think in terms of causalities, probabilities, and if-then sequences than their peers. Therefore, they are not prepared to learn under the future-oriented instruction. To our knowledge, this theory of time perspective concordance (or discordance) has not been tested empirically in education settings.

This study filled a few research gaps including the lack of 1) studies on time perspectives in children, 2) experimental studies on FTP-motivation relationships, and 3) evidence for time perspective concordance. Accordingly, there were three hypotheses. First, stronger dispositional FTP would be associated with better academic outcomes (i.e., better academic performance, stronger intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and weaker amotivation) in primary school students. Second, a future-oriented instructional context would lead to better academic outcomes. Third, the concordance between dispositional and instructional FTP would lead to better academic outcomes. That is, students with strong FTP in future-oriented instructional context and students with weak FTP in present-oriented instructional context would show more favorable academic outcomes.

The participants were students within classrooms, with randomization taken place at the individual level within classes. Assuming the effect size at 0.5, power at 0.80, alpha at 0.05, effect size variability across classes at 0.01, level-1 variance explained by covariates at 20%, variance explained by classes at 20%, and class size at 15, the required number of classes was 8 (Raudenbush et al., 2011). The effect size was estimated based on past studies with FTP manipulation (Allemand, 2008; Li, 2019). The estimate reflected a 50% valid response rate from a class size of 30.

The students were in grade 2 or 3 with Chinese as their first language recruited in a public primary school in Hong Kong. Among the 111 students recruited in eight classes, 19 were excluded because they failed a quality checking item after the experimental manipulation. Therefore, the analyzed sample included 92 students (Age: M = 8.05, SD = 0.72; 45% being girls).

Adapted from the Future Time Perspective Scale (Husman and Shell, 2008), the Chinese-Version Future Time Perspective Scale (CFTPS; Lin et al., 2015) was used to measure dispositional FTP. The participants rated 27 items such as “half a year seems like a long time to me” and “it is more important to save for the future than to buy what one wants today” on a five-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree). A composite score was used with higher scores indicating stronger FTP.

Academic achievement was measured by a reading task using eight questions related to a Chinese passage of about 500 characters. The passage and the questions were retrieved from The Hong Kong Education Bureau Territory-wide System Assessment (2010) for measuring the learning ability of students in grade 3. An older version was chosen to avoid any practice effect. One point was given to each correct answer.

The participants responded to the 28-item Academic Motivation Scale (Vallerand et al., 1992), which measure intrinsic motivation (e.g., “Because I experience pleasure and satisfaction while learning new things”), extrinsic motivation (e.g., “In order to have a better salary later on”) and amotivation (e.g., “I can’t see why I go to school and, frankly, I couldn’t care less”) on a seven-point Likert scale (1 = does not correspond at all; 7 = correspond correctly). The scale was translated to Chinese and backward translated by a psychology student proficient in both languages to check for consistency. The items within each factor were averaged, with higher scores indicating stronger respective factors.

The information on gender (0 = boys; 1 = girls), age (7–10), and reading frequency (1 = not at all; 5 = always) were used as covariates.

The students in the future group were asked to “draw a future you in the picture frame below assuming you study hard”. The students in the present group were asked to draw a present you with the same instruction. The confounding effects of age or language ability on this drawing task should be minimal. The context was studying for its relevance to academic outcomes. The task allowed students to think and visualize themselves at different time points in their lives and was able to hold their attention for about 15 min.

The principal and the parents of the participants provided informed consents. The students participated voluntarily. All measures were in Chinese and administered to the participants in visual art classes. The study was conducted under the supervision of both the teacher-in-charge and the experimenter (one of the authors). The participants were randomly assigned to the two conditions within each class.

The details of the study were explained to the participants by the experimenter. The participants were instructed not to chat with others or look at others drawings. Each participant was given Booklet A (with two versions: future versus present), the reading booklet, and Booklet B. A booklet was collected before distributing the next. Booklet A, which included the CFTPS and the drawing task (future or present self), was distributed randomly. The teacher read out the items of the CFTPS one-by-one to ensure better attention and understanding among the participants. The participants then drew a picture for another 15 min. After the drawing, the participants completed the quality check and the manipulation check items.

The participants were then given the reading booklet. They were given 10 min to read and memorize the details of the passage.

Booklet B, which included the eight questions related to the passage, the Academic Motivation Scale, and the demographic questions, was administrated at last. The participants completed the reading task within 5 min. After that, the items on Academic Motivation Scale and demographics were read out one-by-one by the experimenter. The study protocol was approved by the Human Subjects Ethics Committee of the first author’s university.

To examine the impact of case exclusion and the randomization quality, t-tests and χ² tests of independence were conducted to examine, respectively, 1) the differences between those included and excluded from the analyses and 2) the differences in the baseline characteristics between those in the future and present conditions. The sample characteristics were summarized. The effect of the manipulation was examined by comparing the level of FTP after the manipulation between the conditions using a t-test.

The hypotheses were tested using multilevel models. One set of the multilevel models was conducted for each academic outcome. In each set, Model one was the baseline model with no predictors to show the amount of variance at the class level. Model two included only the covariates. Dispositional FTP, the code for experimental condition (0 = present; 1 = future), and their interaction term were added in Models 3, 4, and 5, respectively. Dispositional FTP was standardized to reduce multicollinearity. The fixed effects were estimated in the multilevel models using restricted maximum likelihood with the degrees of freedom adjusted for small samples (Kenward and Roger, 1997). As the interest was in total outcome variance explained, only total R ² values, rather than level-specific R ² values, were computed (Rights and Sterba, 2020).

Consistent with previous studies (Avci, 2013; De Bilde et al., 2011; Wininger and DeSena, 2012), stronger dispositional FTP was associated with stronger intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. It was also associated with weaker amotivation before adding the instructional FTP into the prediction. The findings supported again that a strong dispositional FTP may strengthen the instrumentality of present behaviors (Peetsma and van der Veen, 2011) and facilitate the internalization of the distal and external benefits (Husman and Lens, 1999; Lasane and Jones, 1999). This study was unique as the relationships were found in primary school students aged 7–10. It suggests that at least some children at this age are cognitively capable to understand the concept of future. This may also reflect that children in Hong Kong (like other Asian cities such as Seoul and Singapore) may be well socialized to consider the future consequences of their studying behaviors. A qualitative study among lower primary school students in Hong Kong showed that parents often link examination success to future opportunities such as getting promising jobs, having better earning power, going to nicer secondary schools and universities (Carless and Lam, 2014).

The current experimental design allowed the test of causal relationships between instructional FTP and academic outcomes. Compared with a present-oriented activity, we found that a brief future-oriented learning activity was able to increase extrinsic motivation (B = 0.58), but not intrinsic motivation (B = 0.07). In a future-oriented instructional context, future and external rewards may become readily identifiable and bring up the instrumentality of the present studying behaviors immediately. However, internalizing these external rewards such that they match with one’s personal interests is an intentional and proactive process (Ryan and Deci, 2017), which may evolve over time. The non-significant effect on amotivation might be due to its weaker effect (B = 0.43) being tested with a small sample size. Amotivation may also be a rather stable construct that is harder to change (Vallerand et al., 1993). In addition, we suspect that the developing cognitive capacity of children at this age may make them more receptive to instructional FTP than older children or young adults. Thus, the effects of instructional FTP should be tested in other age groups.

The effects of time perspective concordance were shown on reading scores but not academic motivations. As shown in previous studies (Dimmock et al., 2013; Orbell and Hagger, 2006; Orbell and Kyriakaki, 2008), the cognitive responses and behavioral intentions would benefit from the congruence between dispositional time perspective and temporally framed messages. Consistently, the “studying hard” behavior, as reflected in the performance in the reading task, was better with time perspective concordance. Language ability and memory were unlikely to change given the brief manipulation. Attention was more likely to be the mediator of the better performance. While stronger cognitive effort might be given to the reading task for those who drew a temporally congruent picture, those who drew an incongruent picture might have some cognitive resources drained by the cognitive strategies to resolve the dissonance (McGrath, 2017). Both processes might contribute to the differences observed.

The time perspective concordance effects on academic motivations were not found. We suspected that a potential ceiling effect might have counteracted the concordance effects. Specifically, the future drawing might not be able to increase the academic motivations further when both dispositional FTP and academic motivations were high. On the other hand, the future drawing had much room to enhance the academic motivations when both dispositional FTP and academic motivations were low. Thus, a discordance effect might be possible.

There were several limitations. First, only FTP, among other time-perspective dimensions such as past or present, was examined. For instance, past achievements may be considered as sources of self-efficacy for further learning (Bowles, 1999). Future studies may examine other time perspectives. Second, the drawing task was one possible time-based learning activity. The extent to which the results can be applied to other time-based learning activities requires further investigation. Third, the current design could only reflect the immediate cognitive efforts devoted to academic tasks. The enduring effects of time-based instructions should be examined in future studies. Fourth, the randomization yielded biased gender distribution. Fortunately, gender did not moderate the results. Fifth, 19 out of the 111 students failed the quality checking item. Younger students might have difficulties in following the experimental instructions. In addition, the present-drawing effects might be overshadowed by the preconception that “studying hard” is future-oriented in the Hong Kong context. Thus, those in the present condition were more likely to fail the quality checking. Sixth, reading comprehension did not adequately reflect academic performance. Future studies should consider a more comprehensive assessment.

Theoretically, the findings showed the relationships between dispositional FTP and academic outcomes could be extended to children aged 7–10. Instructional FTP was able to alter academic motivations. The effects of time perspective concordance were supported in performance tasks. Practically, it is important to reflect on the effect of teachers time perspective on students academic outcomes (Husman et al., 2015). Teachers instructions and school policies may overly emphasize a sense of FTP, in which present-oriented students may be disadvantaged. While the internalization of extrinsic motivation is essential to sustain students’ volition to academic activities that are not inherently interesting (Niemiec and Ryan, 2009), teachers are encouraged to balance the time-based activities such that students will not give up their efforts or motivation at an early age. Activities can also be tailored to students with different dispositional FTP. Students may also be allowed the autonomy to choose the activities that match with their dispositional FTP. For instance, students may choose their drawing, writing, or problem-based projects on a present or future issue.