Examining Hong Kong students' achievement goals and their relations with students' perceived classroom environment and strategy use

Presenter: Che-Yu LinAdvisor: Ming-Puu ChenDate: 12/23/2009

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Lau, K. L. & Lee, J. (2008). Examining Hong Kong students' achievement goals and their relations with students' perceived classroom environment and strategy use. Educational Psychology, 28(4), 357–372.

Introduction(1/6)• Research using achievement goal theory is currently one of the

most active areas of research into student motivation (Elliot & Thrash,

2001; Harackiewicz & Linnenbrink, 2005; Pintrich, Conley, & Kempler, 2003).

• Achievement goals represent the meaning that individuals assign to achievement situations and provide a cognitive structure for arranging how individuals define success and failure, their affective reactions, and their subsequent behaviours (Dweck, 1986; Urdan, 1997).

• Among various goal orientation theories, two contrasting goal orientations – towards mastery goals or performance goals – have been identified and have received substantial research interest (Ames, 1984; Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Nicholls, 1984).

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Introduction-mastery goal(2/6)• Students with a mastery goal orientation focus on developing

competence, learning, and understanding, they tend to master a task according to self-referenced standards of importance (Pintrich et

al., 2003).

• They still have incentives to learn and are willing to use meaningful processing strategies.

• Research findings have consistently shown that a mastery goal orientation is positively related to students’ intrinsic interest in learning and the use of deep cognitive and self-regulatory strategies (Ames, 1992b; Ames & Archer, 1988; Greene & Miller, 1996; Greene et al., 2004;

Maehr & Anderman, 1993; Meece & Miller, 2001).

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Introduction-performance goal(3/6)• Students with a performance goal orientation focus on

demonstrating competence, being superior to others, and the use of social comparison standards (Pintrich et al., 2003).

• Students who pursue performance goals are likely to look for shortcuts and quick payoffs rather than engage in deep learning (Maehr & Anderman, 1993).

• Some researchers have suggested that students with performance goals are more likely to prefer less challenging tasks and use more surface-level strategies (Ames, 1992b; Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Greene & Miller, 1996).

• There is some evidence that performance goals have positive relations with active engagement and graded performance (Harackiewicz, Barron, & Elliot, 1998; Harackiewicz, Barron, Pintrich, Elliot & Thrash, 2002; Pintrich &

Garcia, 1991).

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Introduction(4/6)• Researchers have suggested that it is important to expand

achievement goal research to investigate different ethnic and cultural groups (Harackiewicz & Linnenbrink, 2005; Urdan, 1997).

• Traditional Chinese culture is influenced by Confucian thinking, which emphasises the important role of effort in pursuing outperforming achievement (Ho, 1994; Xiang, Lee, & Solmon, 1997; Yang, 1997): it is quite likely that Chinese students tend to adopt both mastery goals and performance goals simultaneously.

• Teachers in Hong Kong always show great concern for the academic achievement of their students (Gow, Balla, Kember, & Hau, 1996).

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Introduction(5/6)• Ames’ (1992a) TARGET model is the most influential framework for

studying the relations between students’ perceived classroom environment and their goal orientations.

- the nature and definition of the tasks that teachers ask students to perform - the autonomy that teachers allow students in the learning process - the ways that teachers recognise students - the grouping procedures that teachers employ - the forms of evaluation that are used - the time schedule for learning

• In another article, Ames (1992b) summarised these important classroom factors into three dimensions:

- the design of tasks and learning activities - evaluation practices and use of rewards - distribution of authority

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Introduction(6/6)

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Method

• A total of 925 Grade 8 Hong Kong Chinese students (502 boys and 423 girls) participated voluntarily in our study. They came from six secondary schools with different ability-level intakes.

• Participants completed the Classroom Learning Questionnaire in their daily classes.

- the Survey of Classroom Goals Structures - the Motivation and Strategy Use Survey

Participants

Instruments

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Results(1/4)

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Results(2/4)

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Results(3/4)

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Results(4/4)

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Discussion• The findings of this study indicate that students’ mastery goals

show a stronger relation with their strategy use than other types of goal.

• The study supports the multiple goal perspective that students who pursue mastery goals and performance-approach goals have more positive perceptions of their classroom environment and employ more learning strategies than students who pursued a single goal.

• Perceived instrumentality was found to have close and positive relation with students’ mastery goals and their strategy use.

• Classroom environment also indirectly affected students’ strategy use via mastery goals.