Abstract:

Introduction:
The students’ academic goals along their learning process and their stay in a university could be of interest to the university teachers, because such information should guide teachers on how to motivate their students. Furthermore, there appear to be relevant to know if their academic goals are stable among students in a specific degree or not, for example among physiotherapy students, of if academic goals vary depending on each particular undergraduate group.

Objective:
To analyse the evolution (3-years follow-up) in terms of academic goals in year 2 physiotherapy students at University of Vigo.

Method:
Prospective 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 did), self-defeating goals (SDG) (centered on to see 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 courses 2014-2015, 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 with year 2 physiotherapy students. A sample of 126 students participated in the study (48 students of academic year 2014-2015, 36 of academic year 2015-2016 and 42 of academic year 2016-2017). The average age was 20.64±2.79 years.

Results:
56.3% of the participants were women and 43.7% were men. The students scored higher in TG (mean 4.37±0.42), than in SEG (2.64±0.76), SDG (2.39±1) or WAG (2.40±0.59). No significant differences were observed for the different subscales among year-2 students from the different academic courses. Significant differences were observed by gender for TG and SDG (higher scores for women) (p<0.05). There was a significant inverse correlation for WAG scores and the age of the students.

Conclusions:
Year-2 physiotherapy students at University of Vigo seem to implicate themselves in learn and increase knowledge while performing academic tasks, and such behaviour had no changes along the 3 analysed academic courses. However, there seem to be more implication on learning among women, but also on self-defeating goals. Additionally, being younger appears to be a factor on avoiding effort related to academic work.

Keywords:

Academic Goals, High Education, Physiotherapy.