Christian Escribe | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

Achievement goals and engagement in individual and collective learning activities.

The relationship between achievement goals and individual and collective learning activities was examined for 290 university students who completed two questionnaires. One assessed three achievement goals-a mastery goal and two performance goals, namely, approval seeking and advancing. The other questionnaire measured how actively students report engaging in individual and collective learning activities. Regression analyses showed that the adoption of mastery goals was associated with active engagement in both individual and collective learning, while adoption of a performance goal of approval seeking was associated with passive engagement in individual learning activities. These results are discussed in relation to their theoretical implications and in regard to the possible moderating effect of protecting self-worth.

Achievement↗

PubMed2005

Knowledge accessibility, achievement goals, and memory strategy maintenance.

BACKGROUND: An important aim of educational psychology is to account for the difficulties in cognitive strategy maintenance. Possible explanations may be found in developmental studies concerning the interdependence of knowledge accessibility and strategy use, and in current achievement goal models which assume that individuals with a learning goal use deeper strategies than those with a performance goal. AIMS: The purpose of this study was to examine how knowledge accessibility and achievement goals separately or conjointly affect the maintenance of a categorization strategy, recall performance, and perception of the strategy (utility, difficulty, effort) in a free recall task. SAMPLE: Participants were 93 first-year students from a human science university in France. METHOD: In the first phase, the students were taught how to use a categorization strategy in a recall task involving highly accessible (typical) items. In a subsequent transfer task, the same students were assigned to one of four experimental conditions where they were asked to recall a typical or atypical list and where a learning or performance goal was induced. RESULTS: Analysis showed that whatever the typicality of the list, a learning goal promoted maintenance of the categorization strategy, and of perception of its utility. Performance goal participants only maintained this strategy and its perceptions on typical lists, while on atypical lists they display less clustering and found the strategy less useful. CONCLUSION: Results suggest that maintenance of a cognitive strategy is facilitated when there is compatibility between a performance goal and the task demands, or when the participants are learning-goal oriented.

Achievement↗