Effects of goal structure on Chinese elementary school students' goal orientation, achievement, intrinsic motivation, and beliefs about success/failure

Date

1997-12

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

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Publisher

Texas Tech University

Abstract

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of classroom goal structure (competitive, cooperative, and individualistic) on children's goal orientation, mathematics achievement, intrinsic motivation, and beliefs about success/failure in mathematics environments. A second purpose of this study was to assess gender effects, and the interaction effects between goal structure and gender in these learning situations on the variables related to mathematics learning.

Two hundred forty fifth-grade Chinese children (120 boys and 120 girls) from an elementary school in rural Lu-Chou county of Taipei participated in this study. Boys and girls were randomly selected from the student population of the school and randomly assigned to one of the 3 goal structure conditions. This experimental study used a 3 x 2 factorial design.

Results showed the significance of goal structure effects on mastery goal orientation, mathematics achievement, intrinsic motivation, and beliefs about success. Children in the cooperative and individualistic goal groups had higher mastery goal orientations than children in the competitive goal group. They also scored higher in mathematics achievement and intrinsic motivation. They were also more likely to believe that effort led to success and to regard the teacher as a helper. The results also showed a significant gender effect on beliefs about success (success due to task). Boys were likely to attribute success to easiness of the task. On the other hand, there were no gender effects on the variables of goal orientation, mathematics achievement, intrinsic motivation, and beliefs about failure. No interaction effect between goal structure and gender was reported.

These results suggest that educators should develop a mastery goal climate (an individual or a cooperative goal structure) in their learning contexts, which means to stress the importance of understanding, the process of thinking, monitoring the individual's progress, learning for its own sake, and cooperative learning rather than stressing only the outcomes in the mathematics learning environment.

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Keywords

Instructional systems -- Design, Instructional systems -- Study and teaching (Elementary) -- Taiwan, Mathematics -- Study and teaching (Elementary) -- Taiwan, Education technology

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