Abstract:

Achievement goal theory became one of the most influential motivation theories in education since its inception in the 1980s (Urdan & Kaplan 2020). The first class of personal achievement goals emphasizes on academic competence. Such goals include mastery, performance-approach and performance-avoid goals. Realizing the importance of social competence, Ryan and Shim identified another class of goals named social achievement goals. These include social development, social demonstration-approach, and social demonstration-avoid goals (Ryan & Shim, 2006, 2008).

Achievement goal theory postulates that students adopt the personal achievement goals that match the goals stressed in their environment. Their personal achievement goals then influence their performance and intrinsic motivation (Church et al. 2001). The environmentally imposed goals are named goal structures. A meta-analysis confirmed that each achievement goal was most strongly related to its contextual counterpart goal structure, and significantly but less strongly related to all other types of goal structures (the cross-relations) (Bardach et al. 2019).

Conceptualization of goal structures includes teacher-focused and climate oriented (Bardach et al. 2019). The former reflects a teacher’s goals, and latter the goals from the classroom environment. The literature shows that these two types of goal structures are mostly measured by students’ perceptions (Midgley et al. 2000), although they can also be measured by observations of the teachers and classrooms (Patrick et al. 2001).

Up to date, the majority of measures of goal structures focuses on academic achievement goals. In other words, even though social achievement goals have been broadly studied, no corresponding goal structures are identified and measured.

In this study, we stress the importance of installing social achievement goals in students, especially in preparing them for today’s largely collaborative and cooperative work environments. Despite the findings of cross-relations among academic achievement goal structures and personal social achievement goals (Bardach et al. 2019), we believe that directly focusing on social achievement goal structures can enhance students’ adoption of their social achievement goals, thus be more effective in their efforts and outcomes of social competencies development. Our position is to consider both the academic and social achievement goal structures when studying the design and effects of a learning environment. This understanding not only can enhance instructional design strategies and tactics, but also can influence technology design to facilitate teaching.

We will present the constructs and measures of students’ perceptions of academic and social achievement goal structures, and demonstrate how such are incorporated in an undergraduate course in a major North American University.

Keywords:

Achievement goal theory, social achievement goals, goal structure, undergraduate.