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

1988; American Psychological Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1037//0022-0663.80.3.260

1939-2176

Carole Ames, Jennifer Archer,

Educational Practices and Challenges

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, 1979Nicholls, , 1984;; see also deCharms, 1968 see also deCharms, , 1976)), as learning oriented versus performance oriented (Dweck, 1986(Dweck, , 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.Ames & Archer, 1987).With a performance goal orientation, there is a concern with being judged able, and one shows evidence of ability by being successful, by outperforming others, or by achieving success with little effort.A performance goal reflects a valuing of ability and normatively high outcomes.With a mastery goal, importance is attached to developing new skills.The process of learning itself is valued, and the attainment of mastery is seen as dependent on effort.Achievement goal orientations are presumed to differ as a function of situational demands, as well as to vary across individuals (Maehr, 1983(Maehr, , 1984)).There is, in fact, considerable research evidence that situational demands can affect the salience of specific goals, which results in differential patterns of cognition, affect, and performance (e.g., Ames, 1984b;Ames, Ames, & Felker, 1977;Covington, 1984;Covington & Omelich, 1984).For example, when social comparison has been made salient, students have focused on their ability, and these self-perceptions have mediated performance and affec-