A Study On Junior Students' Achievement Goals, Learning Strategies And Academic Achievements

Since the 1960's, with the rising of cognitive psychology, psychologists have begun to explain the individual achievement motivation and achievement behavior from social cognitive perspective. The social cognitive theory about motivation consists of attribution theory, self-efficacy theory, perceived ability theory and achievement goals theory, and the study of the achievement goals theory has become a noticeable subject. Against the background that many countries all over the world pay much attention to teaching students how to study and think, the research on learning strategies is also paid more attention to by psychologists. Since the 1990's ,the study on learning strategies has been a central issue in the Psychological field. In school, it is very important for students to know how to study. It is helpful for them to have some learning strategies to achieve the goal; It is one part of teachers' important tasks to try to improve the standard of student's learning strategies and train students to study on their own.Achievement goals theory is the advance subject of achievement motivation and the extension of the study on goal setting. The achievement goals are defined as the preservation of the goals or reason for participating in certain achievement task and the individual evaluation of attaining goals. Learning strategies refer to learner's knowledge of study tasks, the usage of study methods and the regulation of study processes.Many studies have explored the development of achievement goals and learning strategies, as well as the relation among achievement goals, learning strategies and academic achievements. But as far as the studies in our country are concerned, the measure of achievement goals often adopts dichotomous questionnaire and they confine their subjects to the students from the city. And when they study the relations among achievement goals, learning strategies and academic achievements and investigate the sole effect of achievement goals by the correlation analysis, regressionanalysis and path analysis and seldom attempt to explore the joint effect of achievement goals, Therefore, on the basis of these researches, the thesis uses comprehensively documentary method, questionnaire investigation, interview method and case analysis, chooses 395 students in a County of Henan province as subjects, adopts the questionnaire of achievement goals orientation and learning strategies as investigative instruments and discusses the relationship of achievement goals. Learning strategies and academic achievements, the results show:1. There exists sex differences of achievement goals among junior students, girls' mastery goals are higher than boys', boys' marks in the performance-approach and performance-avoid goals are higher than girls'. There exists grade differences in mastery goals and performance-avoid goals. The development tendency of the former presents the shape of "V" and the development tendency of the latter presents upside-down shape of "V". The mastery goals are the dominant goals in junior students. There exists the differences between students in the city and these in the country in learning strategies and performance-avoid goals.2. Mastery goals are significantly positively related to all the factors and total marks of learning strategies. Performance-approach goals are significantly positively related to social strategies, while performance-avoid goals weakly negatively related to all the factors and total marks of learning strategies. Mastery goals and performance-approach goals are positively related to the marks of Chinese, maths and English and to their total marks. Performance-avoid goals are weakly related to academic achievements. All the factors and total marks of learning strategies are significantly positively related to academic achievements.3. There exist a linear relationship between learning strategies , performance-approach goals and academic achievements. Its coefficient of determination rises up to 0.242. There is a linear relationship between mast...