Achievement goals in the classroom: Students' learning strategies and motivation processes.

Abstract

We studied how specific motivational processes are related to the salience of mastery and performance goals in actual classroom settings. One hundred seventy-six students attending a junior high/high school for academically advanced students were randomly selected from one of their classes and responded to a questionnaire on their perceptions of the classroom goal orientation, use of effective learning strategies, task choices, attitudes, and causal attributions. Students who perceived an emphasis on mastery goals in the classroom reported using more effective strategies, preferred challenging tasks, had a more positive attitude toward the class, and had a stronger belief that success follows from one's effort. Students who perceived performance goals as salient tended to focus on their ability, evaluating their ability negatively and attributing failure to lack of ability. The pattern and strength of the findings suggest that the classroom goal orientation may facilitate the maintenance of adaptive motivation patterns when mastery goals are salient and are adopted by students. Recent research on achievement motivation has focused on identifying different types of goal orientations among students, the motivational processes that are associated with these different goals, and the conditions that elicit them. These goal orientations have been contrasted as task involved versus ego involved (Maehr, 1983; Maehr & Nicholls, 1980; Nicholls, 1979, 1984; see also deCharms, 1968, 1976), as learning oriented versus performance oriented (Dweck, 1986, 1988; Dweck & Elliott, 1984), and as mastery focused versus ability focused (Ames, 1984a; Ames & Ames, 1984). Because the conceptual relations among task, learning, and mastery goals and among ego, performance, and ability goals are convergent, these perspectives have been integrated and are hereafter identified as mastery and performance goals, respectively (cf.

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