engleski

Goal Orientation, Learning Strategies, and Academic Achievement in High-School Students: The Role of Perceived School and Parent Goal Orientation

Three goal orientations are usually distinguished: learning or mastery, performance and task-avoidance orientations. These goal-orientations could be developed in the context of the family, as well as in the context of classroom. Learning goal orientation leads to the use of deep processing strategies and positively affects school achievement. Performance goal orientation leads to the use of surface processing strategies and self-handicapping behaviour, which result in lower achievement. Pintrich (2000) suggested that the identification of multiple goals may be a better approach to the issue of goal orientation than the described one, because students may at the same time want to master knowledge material but outperform all others in the classroom. The aim of the present study was to examine relations between students’ goal orientation, perceived goal orientation of classroom, teachers and parents, reading and learning strategies, and school achievement. Participants were high school students from two gymnasiums (16- to 18-years old). They responded to a self-report questionnaire, which included four scales from PALS (Midgley et al., 2000) and five subscales from CSRL inventory (Niemivirta, 1998), as well as The Strategic reading questionnaire (Kolić-Vehovec & Bajšanski, 2001). Regression analyses showed that parents and classroom goal orientations were better predictors for all three personal goal orientations than teacher goal orientation. Cluster analysis extracted three clusters of students according to their goal orientation: Cluster 1 named work-avoidance orientation (high work-avoidance, low learning and performance) ; Cluster 2 named performance orientation (average learning, high performance and work-avoidance) ; and Cluster 3 named learning orientation (high learning, average performance, low work-avoidance). One-way ANOVAs showed that students with learning goal orientation use reading strategies more often and self-handicapping strategies less often than other two groups and they also have better school achievement. Students with work-avoidance orientation use deep processing strategies and reading strategies less often than other two groups.

goal orientation; learning strategies; academic achievement

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