An observational study : investigating the relationship among achievement goal structures, students’ personal characteristics, motivation and engagement

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship among teacher promoted achievement goal structures (mastery and performance-approach goal structures), students’ dispositional achievement motives (need for achievement and fear of failure), student motivation (achievement goals) and engagement in specific class sessions. While dispositional achievement motives and achievement goals were measured through only the students’ self-reports, promoted achievement goal structures and student engagement were measured assessed by students, teachers and additionally by external observers. The study was conducted in a public Anatolian high school in Ankara, Turkey with the participation of 310 students and 10 teachers. Two trained observers carried out the observations of 10 different classes.The results of the regression and Bootstrap analyses revealed that the student perceived mastery goal structures had a positive indirect effect on all aspects of engagement through mastery-approach goal endorsement (i.e., the goal to learn and improve). The results also showed that fear of failure had a negative relation to engagement through low mastery-approach goal endorsement. Performance goal structures, on the other hand, failed to predict any aspect of student engagement. However, the endorsed performance-approach goals weakly predicted engagement showing that the goal to outperform others could weakly support students’ engagement. The results revealed the equal importance of contextual and personal factors in relation to student motivation and engagement. Furthermore, the teachers overestimated their promotion of achievement goal structures and student engagement in comparison to students’ and observers’ evaluation. Although student evaluations regarding these variables were higher than that of the observers, a MANOVA showed that students in classes with high mastery goal structures according to the observers tended to engage with the lesson and endorse mastery-approach goals more compared to the students in classes with low and average mastery goal structures. Overall, instructional behaviors such as supporting learning and self-based evaluation was indicated to be promoting good quality of student motivation, which in turn predicts student engagement with the lesson.