Academic goals and learning quality in higher education students.

Full Abstract

In this paper, the relations between academic goals and various indicators that define the quality of the learning process are analyzed. The purpose was to determine to what extent high, moderate, or low levels of academic goals were positively or negatively related to effort regulation, the value assigned to academic tasks, meta-cognitive self-regulation, self-efficacy, beliefs about learning control, and management of time and study environment. The investigation was carried out with a sample of 632 university students (70% female and 30% male) and mean age of 21.22 (SD=2.2).The results show that learning goals, or task orientation, are positively related to all the indictors of learning quality considered herein. Although for other kinds of goals-work-avoidance goals, performance-approach goals, and performance-avoidance goals-significant relations were not found with all the indicators, there was a similar tendency of significant results in all cases; the higher the levels of these goals, the lower the levels of the indicators of learning quality.

Author information

Author/s: Valle, Antonio (A); Núñez, José C (JC); Cabanach, Ramón G (RG); González-Pienda, Julio A (JA); Rodríguez, Susana (S); Rosário, Pedro (P); Muñoz-Cadavid, María A (MA); Cerezo, Rebeca (R);

Affiliation: Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Universidad de A Coruña, Spain. vallar(-atsign-)udc.es

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: The Spanish journal of psychology (Span J Psychol), published in Spain. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-May; vol 12 (issue 1) : pp 96-105

Dates: Created 2009/05/29; Completed 2009/06/19;

PMID: 19476223, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 6/19/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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