Relations among students' competence beliefs, task values, achievement goals, strategic and cognitive processes, and academic achievement in Korean elementary school mathematics classrooms

The purpose of this study was to better understand the patterns of various motivational constructs and how each construct relates to strategic and cognitive processes and academic achievement in Korean elementary school mathematics classrooms. Both 51-item student questionnaire and a mathematics lest were administered to 459 fifth-graders (boys = 226; girls = 233). The results of this study reveal more similarities than differences in various motivational constructs. In addition, the results provide empirical evidence for the importance of considering both motivational belief and strategic and cognitive strategy components in academic performance. Students' involvement in cognitive processes is closely tied to competence beliefs to perform classroom tasks, to achievement goals, and to beliefs that classroom activities are interesting, important, and useful. Students' success or failure in academic achievement closely related to competence beliefs, performance-avoidance goals, and persistence strategies.; This study demonstrates positive potential of performance-approach goals in Korean elementary school mathematics classrooms, relative to task goals. Performance-approach goals closely link to competence beliefs, task values, and achievement and engender active strategic and cognitive processes as do task goals (Bong, 2001; Harackiewicz, 2002). However, these findings lead some different conclusions than those of Middleton and Midgley (1997) in American middle school mathematics classrooms. They showed that performance-approach goals unrelated to competence-beliefs and positively related to avoidance behaviors and concluded that performance-approach goals were not facilitative.; The implication of this study is that task goals definitely closely related to adaptive academic behaviors. Thus, we support efforts to promote the adoption of task goals. However, we also need to acknowledge the potential additional benefits of performance-approach goals in specific contexts (Hidi & Harackiewicz, 2000).