Achievement Goals Vs. Class Performance
The purpose of this study was to find a correlation between achievement goals, strategy use, and class performance while enrolled in an educational psychology course. The focus questions for this study were: “how do students’ reported their achievement goals and the importance of different study strategies evolve over a 14-week educational psychology course?”
The methodology used to obtain the data was a mixed methods approach since the researchers wanted to obtain both qualitative and quantitate data. The voluntary participants consisted of sixty under graduate of mixed genders and races.
Methodology
The students were asked to write specific learning goals and learning outcomes on test performances. During the course of the semester when the students received their classroom exams back with feedback they were asked to review the exams and also reflect on their performance on their goals, strategies and reflections sheet. This reflection sheet was designed with a Likert scale in order to evaluate and compare the student’s performance, strategies and learning goals with their initial responses. The reflections lasted about 10-15 minutes. Since this was a mixed methods research design several different analysis were used in order to retrieve the quantitative and qualitative data. For the quantitative aspect of this study the researchers used ANOVA procedure of the General Linear Model on SPSS to examine how students’ perceived achievement goals and importance of different study strategies evolved over the semester. The researcher’s also used a Chi square procedure in order to examine the extent to which students intended to change their goals and study strategies. The third, method used was the Pearson correlation and logistic regression procedures. This was used in order to examine the relationships between achievement