Abstract:

Introduction:
The current reality of education in Higher education centres the teaching-learning process on the learner. One of the most relevant aspects could be to know what are the reasons that motivate students to implicate themselves in the tasks of learning, what are their academic goals, and the supposed differences between gender.

Objective:
To analyse the differences between gender in terms of academic goals in second year Physiotherapy students at University of Vigo.

Method:
Cross-sectional descriptive study. The Spanish version of the Skaalvik goals questionnaire (1997) was used. This scale access 4 types of academic goals: task goals (TG) (centered on to learn and to increase knowledge), self-enhancing goals (SEG) (centered on to show a better performance than the others), self-defeating goals (SDG) (centered on to seem poorer skilled in the eyes of the others), and work avoidance goals (WAG) (centered on avoiding effort). The study was carried out in the academic course 2014-2015 and second year Physiotherapy students participated in it. A sample of 48 students participated in the study (76.19% of the enrolled students). The average age was 20.28 ± 2.26 years.

Results:
56.25% of the participants were women and 43.75% were men. To the total sample, students scored higher in TG (mean 4.41 ± 0.41), than in SEG (2.79 ± 0.65), SDG (2.46 ± 1) or WAG (2.42 ± 0.62). Significant differences by gender were observed in 3 items of the questionnaire (all of them included in the subscale of SDG), being significantly higher the scores in GAP for women (p<0.05).

Conclusions:
Second year Physiotherapy students at University of Vigo seem to implicate themselves in learn and increase knowledge while performing academic tasks. In future studies, it could be interesting to know if this behaviour would be or not related to a higher academic performance, to analyse the conduct in the other academic courses of the Degree, and even in other Degrees of Physiotherapy at different universities.

Keywords:

Academic Goals, Higher Education, Physiotherapy.