Abstract
Social cognitive theories on learning have considered the role of beliefs, thoughts and perceptions in motivating students to adopt adaptive learning strategies. The concept of goals has emerged to be useful in explicating the origins and correlates of adaptive learning. There are two general goal orientations that students can adopt in learning: task-focused and performance-focused. Goal orientations are related to a number of motivational and cognitive processes, which may contribute to performance outcomes. Students adopting a task-focused goal are primarily concerned with learning to improve their understanding. Students who adopt a performance-focused goal are concerned with grades and concentrate on outperforming others. The goal orientation theory (Ames & Ames, 1989; Anderman & Maehr, 1994 ,Maehr & Pintrich, 1991 ; Urdan & Maehr, 1995) has been used extensively as a framework for research in academic settings and recently has proven useful in guiding school change (Maehr, Midgley, 1996) in US. Although the conceptual framework underlining the goal orientation theory of the motivation and achievement is derived from research on US students, the basic model has been successfully applied to the analysis of students in other individualistic cultures.
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Shi, K. et al. (2001). Goals and Motivation of Chinese Students — Testing the Adaptive Learning Model. In: Salili, F., Chiu, C.Y., Hong, Y.Y. (eds) Student Motivation. Plenum Series on Human Exceptionality. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1273-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1273-8_12
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