The interrelationships among goal orientation, coping, and achievement motivation after perceived academic failures
Access full-text files
Date
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Academic failure, which is defined in this research as unsatisfactory performance on an exam, is a common cause of stress for students in academic settings. It may lead to either beneficial or detrimental effects on students’ learning and motivation. Two factors that may influence the difference in reaction to academic failure are the goal orientation that students pursue in the learning context, and the ways that students cope with the academic failure. The purpose of this study is to provide a detailed understanding of the relationships among goal orientation and academic failure coping strategies, as well as their effects on students’ achievement motivation, using the goal orientation theory framework proposed by Elliot and Church (1997) for the study of college students. Four additional exploratory analyses were also performed which further investigated the important issues regarding the relationships among goal orientation, coping mechanisms, and achievement motivation after failure. The findings from a study of 71 college students indicated that differences in goal orientations tended to indicate a difference in the focus of coping strategies. In addition, differences in the focus of coping strategies were associated with different patterns of achievement motivation. Results from the other exploratory analyses, revealed furthermore (1) the detailed associations between goal orientations and specific coping strategies, as well as the detailed relationship between specific coping strategies and motivation constructs, (2) high stability of goal orientations among college students (3) the mediating effect of coping in the relationship between goal orientations and achievement motivation, and, (4) patterns of coping while students pursue multiple goals in the classroom. The results support past research that presumed the importance and the adaptiveness of mastery goals in the situation of failure. The creation of a classroom that promotes mastery goal orientation may be crucial to the encouragement of adaptive coping responses and the reduction of maladaptive ones. The results also suggest a set of coping strategies that are potentially effective at helping students stay motivated after an experience of failure, such as positive reinterpretation of failure.