Comparing Students’ Achievement Goal Responses to Open-Ended and Likert-Type Survey Questions

• In Event: Roundtable Session 126
  In Roundtable Session: Measuring Motivation

Abstract

The primary purposes of the current studies were to get a closer understanding of students’ achievement goals by examining the spontaneous responses to an open-ended question and comparing these responses to those from an achievement goal survey. In Study 1, we identified relationships between achievement goals from open-ended and survey responses. Correlations between the same goals obtained from these two methods were low or non-significant. Achievement goals from the two methods also demonstrated different correlation patterns with motivational outcomes. In Study 2, we investigated whether a domain-general and domain-specific open-ended question would lead to different achievement goal responses. The subject-specific open-ended question led students to focus more on present-oriented academic goals, whereas the domain-general question evoked more future-oriented social-academic goals.

Authors

• Minhye Lee, Korea University

• Sun Kyung Lee, Korea University

• Sung-Il Kim, Korea University

• Mimi Bong, Korea University