achievement goals in the classroom students learning.pdfVIP

Journal of Educational Psychology Copyright 1988 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 1988, Vol. 80, No. 3, 260-267 0022-0663/88/$00.75 Achievement Goals in the Classroom: Students Learning Strategies and Motivation Processes Carole Ames and Jennifer Archer University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 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 academicallyadvanced 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 ones 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 orienta