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Article Excerpt
Abstract
There are many approaches to studying students' motivational belief. One approach is students' goal pursuit. Generally, two types of goals are considered, social and achievement. There has been dispute regarding the relationships between students' achievement goal orientations and their social goals. The present article correlates the constructs in one social goal model and one achievement goal model. Contrary to some previous research, it appeared that social and achievement goal orientations are separate constructs. Additionally, mastery-approach achievement goal oriented students are the most socially inclined.
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Achievement motivation (the reasons why a student achieves) is a key determinant of classroom behavior and plays a critical role in academic achievement. There are a multitude of motivation theories and refinements to those theories, many definitions of motivation, and many constructs related to motivation. For example, students' beliefs about effort, ability, goal setting, and task difficulty play important roles in motivation, which in turn affect academic outcomes (e.g., Bandura, 1977; Elliot & McGregor, 2001; Weiner, 1985). These attributes of achievement are found in many theories of motivation. For example, self-efficacy theory (e.g., Bandura, 1977), attribution theory (e.g., Weiner, 1985), and goal orientation theory (e.g., Elliot & McGregor, 2001) each focus on some aspect of ability, effort, task difficulty, or goals. In this article, motivation is addressed in terms of goals.
Goal Orientations
Goal orientations are "a set of behavioral intentions that determine how students approach and engage in learning activities" (Meece, Blumenfeld, & Hoyle, 1988, p. 514). Across the past two decades, the goal orientations addressed in the achievement motivation literature have developed from a dichotomy (mastery versus performance, Dweck, 1986), to a trichotomy, (mastery, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance, Elliot & Harackiwiecz, 1996), to a quadripolar model of goal orientations (Elliot & McGregor, 2001).
The most current model of achievement goal orientations, the quadripolar model, includes an approach-avoidance distinction made for each of the mastery and performance goal orientations. Hence, there are the mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance goal orientations. A mastery-approach goal orientation "represents a desire to develop competence and increase knowledge and understanding through effortful learning" (Murphy & Alexander, 2000, p. 28). The mastery-approach orientation is contrasted to the mastery-avoidance orientation, such that mastery-avoidant individuals attempt to avoid losing competency, skill, and appreciation, rather than attempting to gain it. In addition, Elliot (1999) theorizes that mastery-avoidance goal oriented individuals will avoid "self-referential or task-referential incompetence" (p. 181). Performance-approach and performance-avoidance constitute the performance goal orientations. Students characterized as performance-avoidance seek to avoid negative judgments of their performance in relation to other people (e.g., do not want to get lower grades than...
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