If people's goals and evaluative standards were aligned, then individuals with mastery-based goals should, theoretically, primarily rely on temporal comparison information (i.e., on how they performed relative to before). In contrast, individuals with performance-based goals should rely on social comparison information (i.e., on how they performed relative to others). However, across three stud...

BACKGROUND The achievement goal theory defines two major foci of students' learning goals (1) primarily interested in truly mastering a task (mastery orientation), and (2) striving to show ones competences to others (performance orientation). The present study is undertaken to better understand if and how health profession students' goal orientations change during the undergraduate program and ...

The present study was aimed at investigating the relationships between students’ perceived classroom achievement goals, school engagement and substance use in terms of smoking and drinking, and at investigating gender differences regarding these issues in a sample of 1,239 Norwegian 10 grade students. A multivariate analysis showed that motivational and affective school engagement was predicted...

Two experiments focused on examining the influence of mastery-avoidance goals on performance improvement, and more specifically, on mastery-avoidance goals grounded in an intrapersonal standard. That is, herein, mastery-avoidance goals entail striving to avoid doing worse than one has done before. Both experiments demonstrated that in a multiple-trial context, mastery-avoidance goals are delete...

The purpose of this study was to examine the multiple mediational roles of academic social comparison directions (upward academic social comparison and downward academic social comparison) on the relationships between achievement goal orientations (i.e., mastery goals, performance-approach goals, and performance-avoidance goals) and subjective well-being (SWB) in school (school satisfaction, sc...

There is a consensus of opinion among proponents of theories of achievement goals that people may choose to pursue two different types of goals: mastery goals that focus on developing competence through task mastery and learning and performance goals that focus on demonstrating competence by outperforming others (Ames and Archer, 1987; Dweck and Leggett, 1988; Nicholls, 1989; Ames, 1992; Pintri...

Motivation research has shown significant relations of students’ mastery goal orientation and perceived competence to educational outcomes, but has not simultaneously scrutinized their relative influences on various educational outcomes. In the present investigation, a sample of Australian students from 6 secondary schools in Western Sydney (N = 1519) responded to survey items that measured mas...

The present study examined how achievement goals affect retrieval-induced forgetting. Researchers have suggested that mastery-approach goals (i.e., developing one’s own competence) promote a relational encoding, whereas performance-approach goals (i.e., demonstrating one’s ability in comparison to others) promote item-specific encoding. These different encoding processes may affect the degree t...