Sociocultural Influences on Achievement Goals: The "Why" and "How" of Goal Adoption and Regulation

• In Event: Part 1 – Recent Advancement in Sociocultural Influences on Motivation and Learning: Big Theories Revisited

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to present a model or taxonomy that classifies the reasons (i.e., the ‘why’) underlying the adoption of achievement goals into six categories associated with the person’s dispositions and the nested sociocultural environments surrounding the person. Second, the paper seeks to articulate the potential mechanisms of how such reasons, which are socialized through the interactions between the person and his/her sociocultural environments, influence the adoption and regulation of goals.

Theoretical framework: Achievement goal theory posits that the purposes that students strive to attain when engaging in achievement-relevant tasks (i.e., their achievement goals) provide a motivational framework through which they would respond (think, feel, behave) to the task and situation (Elliot & Hulleman, 2017). Recent theorizing (a) more precisely defines achievement goals as cognitive representations of competence-focused aims that students seek to achieve; (b) posits that a variety of reasons may underlie the adoption of goals; (c) predicts that the extent to which the synergy between a goal and a reason (i.e., a goal complex) is adaptive for student learning would depend on the sociocultural context where learning takes place; and (d) calls for research to examine a wider range of reasons of the goal pursuit that may explicate cross-cultural differences in the effects of goals (Senko & Tropiano, 2016; Sommet & Elliot, in press).

Modes of inquiry: A growing literature, based on both quantitative and qualitative lines of enquiry, provides theoretical, conceptual, and empirical bases for the classification of reasons that undergird the adoption of achievement goals, and the mechanisms in which sociocultural environments influence the adoption and regulation of such goals (Boekaerts et al., 2006; Elliot, 1999; Ford, 1994; Lee & Bong, 2015; Urdan & Mestas, 2006).

Results: Guided by the bioecological model of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1989), the model, seen in Table 1, classifies six sets of reasons that are associated with the student, the people (teacher, parents, peers) that the student directly interacts with (microsystem), the links between socializers in the microsystem (mesosystem), the educational policies and practices (exosystem), the cultural context (macrosystem), and the student’s past and future orientations (chronosystem). It is also posited that the sociocultural context may influence the adoption and regulation of achievement goals in three primary ways: (a) the direct effect of the sociocultural context on the adoption of achievement goals; (b) the indirect effect of the sociocultural context has on the adoption of achievement goals through how it shapes and activates reasons underlying the goal adoption, and (c) the effect that the sociocultural context exerts on the strength of the link between a goal and a reason and the nature of effects of this link (the goal complex) on learning processes and outcomes.

Scholarly significance: The proposed model and mechanisms are a timely response to a call for programmatic research on goal complexes. They are a promising approach to advance our theoretical and empirical work seeking to better understand sociocultural influences on, and effects of, goal adoption and regulation.

Authors

• Gregory Arief D. Liem, National Institute of Education - Nanyang Technological University

• Andrew J. Elliot, University of Rochester