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This study aimed to better understand the links among academic attitudes, academic procrastination, metacognition, and academic achievement in mathematics among school-age children. In total, 614 urban primary school students from third to sixth grade participated in this study and were asked to complete the Attitude toward Mathematics Inventory, the Academic Procrastination Scale and the Pupils’ Metacognitive Ability in Mathematics Questionnaire. The results revealed significant correlations among the students’ mathematical attitudes, academic procrastination, mathematical metacognition and mathematical achievement. The results also revealed that the impact of mathematical attitudes on mathematical achievement was partially mediated by academic procrastination. Moreover, mathematical metacognition moderated the relation between academic procrastination and mathematical achievement among the female students but not the male students. In particular, the higher the female students’ mathematical metacognition, the weaker the effect of academic procrastination on mathematical achievement. Implications for future research and educational practice are also discussed.

Aiming at the problem of low student enthusiasm in piano teaching, this work tries to apply “Pygmalion effect” to piano teaching from the perspective of educational psychology. With experimental research as the means, 45 students are chosen from 9 classes in grade 2, 4, and 6 of a central elementary school in Beijing City, and the experimental group and the control group are set up. Questionnaire is adopted to conduct the pre-test and post-test of the experiment to analyze the factors that affect the students’ attitude towards music learning, as well as the effect of piano teaching. The results show that the Pearson correlation coefficient (two-tailed) between the piano teacher’s encouragement level and the students in the piano course is 0.427**, indicating that the piano teacher’s encouragement level and the students’ enthusiasm in the piano course are significantly correlated at the 0.01 level. The Pearson correlation coefficient (two-tailed) between student confidence level and piano learning activity is 0.276**, indicating that there is a significant correlation between self-efficacy and student piano learning enthusiasm at the 0.01 level. The pre-test and post-test results show that the students in the experimental group of each grade generally perform much better in piano learning than the students in the control group, which proves that the Pygmalion effect can play an excellent intervention role in piano teaching. In this research, the value of “Pygmalion effect” in the educational psychology of piano music education in primary schools is deeply studied to explore the possibility of a novel piano teaching model. The research results show that teacher encouragement can stimulate students’ subjective initiative and make students perform better in piano learning. This research provides reference and ideas for the combination of education and psychology related research in music classroom.