Achievement Goals, Environmental Goals To Guide The Relationship Between Achievement Motivation And Learning

How about the effect of different types of achievement goals on learning? Since the definition was engendered, achievement goal attracted researchers' attention. Early researches indicate master goal is good for learning, and performance is bad for learning. But recently, theorizers considered is a different thing to say which one is good or bad. First, master goal and performance goal will have different effects on different outcomes (specialized goal hypothesis, Barron & Harackiewicz, 2001). Second, the goal effects maybe was moderated by some other personality variables (e.g. achievement motivation) (Harackiewicz & Elliot, 1993). Thirdly, the contextual instruction would interact with the individual achievement goal (Spent & Wentzel, 2003) . So this research tries to add achievement motivation and contextual instruction as another two independent variables to investigate the goal effect on learning.260 high school students completed a set of scales assessing achievement, perceived contextual goal instruction, achievement motivation and interest; and the recent examination score also was collected. According to the compare of two dimensions of Achievement Goal Orientation, participants were divided into two groups, one is master group, and the other is performance group. The same way is applied in Contextual Instruction. And participants were divided into three groups (high, medium and low) with one standard deviation below and above the mean of the score of Achievement Motivation. Take the achievement goal (master or performance), contextual instruction (master or performance), achievement motivation (high, medium and low) as independent variables to make 2×2×3 MANOVA analysis. Results shows three independent variables have three-way interaction on interest and academic performance. Further analyses indicate: (1) master goal instruction has positive effect on learning, but performance goal instruction does not absolutely have negative effect, especial to the students who hold medium achievement motivation. (2) To the medium achievement motivation students, they can get better academic performance when contextual instruction types are consistent with their own achievement goals. (3) With the contextual instruction of master, high achievement motivation students have higher interest when they adopt performance goal. (4) To the high achievement motivation students, the master and performance instruction both can predicate high interest and academic performance. (5) Low achievement motivation students were influenced by contextual goal instruction little, master instruction and performance instruction have no difference on interest..For explore more relationship within these variables, researcher used correlation analysis, and based on this results constructed path model. Results indicate: (1) master goal and master instruction have positive effect on interest. (2) Achievement motivation predicated the adoption of master goal, high achievement motivation students adopt master goal more; but have no predicating effect on adopting of performance goal. (3) Performance instruction predicates adopting of performance goal; and master instruction predicate adopting of master goal. (4) Contextual instruction and achievement motivation have no direct effect on interest and academic performance, achievement goal is mediate variable. (5) Interest mediates the effect of achievement goal on academic performance.