Achievement goals, achievement behaviours, and skill development in the school and home context : their antecedents and correlates

Abstract

The present thesis focused on the associations between elementary grades children's achievement goal orientations, their achievement behaviour and achievement outcomes. The aims of the present thesis were threefold: first, to examine the associations between children's achievement goal orientations, achievement behaviour and skill development in the school context; second, to examine the developmental associations between children's achievement behaviour and skill development in the homework context as well as associations with parental beliefs about their child's success at school; and third, to examine subgroups of children with different profiles in the development of their achievement behaviour and skill development, as well as the potential antecedents of these developmental profiles. The present thesis is based on four datasets. The first dataset included 179 children from eight classes in Estonia. The participants were in the 2nd and 3rd grade during the first measurement and in the 3rd and 4th grade during the second measurement. The second dataset included 174 children from 16 Estonian schools, who were examined twice during the first school year - at the beginning and at the end of the 1 st grade. The third and fourth dataset were the subsamples of the First Steps Study (Lerkkanen, Niemi, Poikkeus, Poskiparta, Siekkinen, & Nurmi, 2006) carried out in Finland. The third dataset included 1267 children, who were followed up from kindergarten until the 2nd grade. The fourth dataset included 448 children examined four times from kindergarten until the 2nd grade. 190 of these children had been identified as at-risk for reading disabilities at the end of their kindergarten year. The results of the present thesis show that poorer skill development creates a basis for the adoption of maladaptive goal orientations in elementary grades. Although the children's goal orientations do not seem to exert a considerable effect on their achievement behaviour, the latter does influence children's skill development with children demonstrating lower effort and higher task-avoidance levels showing poorer skill development. Lower skill development increases children's task-avoidant behavior both in school and homework contexts. Children's task-avoidance while doing their homework seems to affect parental beliefs about children's school success which, in turn affects children's skill development. However, the associations between task-avoidant behaviour and skill development are not always negative. Applying a person-oriented approach yielded four different developmental profiles, two of which demonstrated a discrepancy from the expected negative association pattern between task-avoidant behaviour and skill development. The results indicated that the pre-reading skills predicted differences in reading fluency levels between the developmental profiles whereas children's social competence in kindergarten predicted differences in task-avoidance levels between the developmental profiles.