Stability and change in students' achievement goals (AGs) are of great relevance for educational research and practice. In two separate meta-analyses, we investigated the rank-order stability (93 studies, 569 effect sizes, 54,736 students), as well as the mean-level change (157 studies, 1,170 effect sizes, 81,464 students) in AGs throughout…

This study seeks to identify profiles of depressive symptoms trajectories among a sample of 2,696 Finnish students (56.8% female), followed from 13-14 to 18-19 years old. Piecewise growth mixture analyses identified 5 trajectories: Low Stabilizing (6.20%), Mild Increasing (47.90%), Moderate Stabilizing (36.82%), Low Increasing (3.62%), and High…

Self-regulated learning can be conceptualized as the pursuit of learning goals by means of self-initiated control processes. Models of self-regulated learning postulate that goal-directed processes unfold within individuals from motivational states through volitional-control processes to goal achievement. Thus far, this hypothesis has mostly been…

The effects of ability performance goals, normative performance goals, and mastery goals on anxiety, interest, and performance were examined in a series of experiments. Challenging problem-solving tasks that would demonstrate the effects of each performance goal more clearly were designed. Groups of early adolescents (Study 1) and college students…

Despite the fact that most competence-relevant settings are "socially" relevant settings, the interpersonal effects of achievement goals have been understudied. This is all the more surprising in the case of performance goals, for which self-competence is assessed using an other-referenced standard. In the present research, performance…

Despite the increasing number of studies examining the correlates of interest and boredom, surprisingly little research has focused on within-person fluctuations in these emotions, making it difficult to describe their situational nature. To address this gap in the literature, this study conducted repeated measurements (12 times) on a sample of…

We examined the nature of self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism in relation to the motivation and achievement of 306 Korean 7th graders. We also tested the mediating role of domain-specific academic self-efficacy and achievement goals in the relationships between perfectionism and achievement-related outcomes across math and English.…

Evaluation is an inescapable feature of academic life with regular grading and performance appraisals at school and at university. Although previous research has indicated that evaluation and grading in particular are likely to have a substantial impact on motivational processes, little attention has been paid to the relationship between grading…

Two experiments using two versions of the missionary and cannibal problem investigated the conditions under which the specification of a subgoal would facilitate problem solving. Specification of a subgoal in the smaller problem space improved performance only in reaching the subgoal when it was not too distant from the initial state. (Author/DEP)

Verbalizing reasons for engaging in an activity was as effective or more effective than praising second graders for task performance. (RC)

The effects of number of objective-relevant sentences on learning from texts ranging in length from about 800 to 3,000 words were investigated in two related experiments. (Author)

The purpose of this experiment was to develop a more explicit conceptual model regarding how learning goals influence learning from text than is currently available. (Author/DEP)

Examines the relationship between the number of learning goals and decreased performance on goal-relevant test items, and explores characteristics of goal-descriptive directions that influence the recall of incidental information from text. (BJG)

Three experiments involving 218 college students demonstrated that both labeling and visually isolating a set of steps in examples independently help students learn a subgoal and makes them more likely to solve novel problems that involve that subgoal although they require different steps to achieve it. (SLD)