Research On The Relations Among Achievement Goals, Self-regulation, And Academic Performance For Average-achieving Students

To explore the psychological characteristic of average-achieving students, the relations among achievement goals, self-regulation, and academic performance were compared by using questionnaires across 2 groups: 117 average-achieving students and 109 high-achieving students. Results indicated that high-achieving students and average-achieving students did not differ on achievement goals. However, the self-regulative level of average-achieving students was remarkably lower than that of high-achieving students, which was mainly reflected in execution, reflectivity, complementarily, summary, and particularly in strategy; In general, self-regulation was positively related to academic performance, but the relationship ranged widely in different subject areas; Achievement goals did not have a direct effect on academic performance, but may exert an indirect influence on performance through self-regulation. The relation between achievement goals and self-regulation was very complex: learning goals were positively correlated to self-regulation, whereas performance goals were strongly related to self-regulation only in conjunction with learning goals. To average-achieving students, those with high learning but low performance goals were most likely to be self-regulating.