Teachers' Achievement Goals in Professional Training Courses: Effects on Learning Engagement and Learning Gains

• In Event: Teacher Motivation for Learning and Professional Development

Abstract

Objectives
Professional training opportunities, particularly professional training courses, are crucial for higher education teachers to improve competencies and realize high quality educational practices. However, within such courses, some academics are more engaged and learn more than others (Ebert-May et al., 2011; Sunal et al., 2001). A thorough understanding of these differences is necessary for supporting effective learning therein. In the present study, we therefore investigated how differences in teachers’ motivations can explain differences in their learning engagement and gains.
Theoretical Framework
A fitting framework for describing different motivations is Achievement Goal Theory (AGT), which has been used to explain differences in learning processes and outcomes in achievement contexts. Here, achievement goals act as a motivational basis for the interpretation of learning situations and self-regulation therein, the quality of cognitive learning processes, and how these are experienced (see Butler, 2000). In studies involving students, school teachers, and preliminary investigations of higher education teachers, achievement goal preferences have been related to aspects of professional learning, allowing for clear hypotheses regarding teachers’ learning engagement in professional training courses (summarized in Table 1).
For learning engagement, we considered the multi-faceted nature of this construct (Bryson & Hand, 2007; Fredricks et al., 2004) and distinguished six aspects, which are further defined in Table 2.
Methods
Forty-eight German higher education teachers completed assessments of goals before course participation (T1), learning engagement three times throughout (T2, T3, T4), and learning gains afterwards (T5). We assessed achievement goals using the scale by Daumiller et al. (2019), learning engagement using established short items, and learning gains using the respective SEEQ subscale (Marsh, 1982). Further information about the scales is presented in Table 2. All data and scripts underlying the present work are available in an open access repository (https://osf.io/wes86/?view_only=f67cbdfe07094e9c903b0ebda1360292)
Results
We conducted latent growth curve models and analyzed how the growth processes of the learning engagement aspects (i.e., their intercept and slope) were associated with the achievement goals. We found learning approach goals to be adaptively related to the overall level of all aspects of learning engagement, and work avoidance goals to be negatively related to them. Based on that, we conducted mediation analyses (see Figure1a-f) and found that teachers’ achievement goals affected the amount that they learned, mediated by their learning engagement. Overall, we found that a substantial amount of variance in participants’ learning engagement and their learning gains were explained (R² = .17–.54).
Scientific and Scholarly Significance of the Study
Taken together, our findings highlight the importance of higher education teachers’ achievement goals for their learning and document how differences in professional learning engagement can be attributed to differences in their achievement goals. Besides a greater understanding of the effects of teacher motivations, these findings provide a starting point for intervention research that can serve to develop strategies that foster adaptive achievement goal pursuit an

Authors

• Martin Daumiller, University of Augsburg

• Raven Rinas, University of Augsburg

• Daria Olden, University of Augsburg

• Markus Dresel, Augsburg University