Browsing by Subject "syypäätelmät"

Objectives. The aim of the present study was to examine what kinds of goal orientation profiles can be identified among middle school students and to examine the relationships between goal orientation profiles and causal attributions for failure. Achievement goal orientations are specific motivational goals that students select during studies. Students can emphasize learning, success, performance and avoidance goals. Causal attributions are inferences that individuals make about the causes of success or failure. According to research there are individual differences in how individuals make attributions in cases of failure or success. Many failure and success situations happen at school, so it is relevant to examine whether there are any differences between different motivational groups and attributions for failure. Methods. The data for this study was part of the PISA 2012 survey. The data was collected from 311 randomly selected schools. The participants of the PISA 2012 survey were a total of 8829 middle school students. A total of 2966 students answered the attribution question form. In the final analysis of variance and covariance, the data consisted of 2966 students. The data was analyzed using IBM SPSS 23 software. Factor analysis was used to form the goal orientations. Two-Step cluster analysis was used to identify groups of students with similar motivational characteristics. The differences between goal orientations groups and attributions were examined using analysis of variance and analysis of covariance. Analysis of covariance was used because it was relevant in examining how the level of knowledge will affect the relationship between goal orientation profiles and attributions. Results and conclusions. The five groups of goal orientation profiles were named as success-oriented, performance-oriented, mastery-oriented, indifferent and avoidance-oriented. The groups were quite similar compared to previous theories and research. The main result of the analysis of covariance was that there were statistical significances between some goal orientation profiles and some attributions. The differences were between the goal orientations and the attributions for bad guesses, bad luck and teacher motivation skill. In addition, there was a difference between goal orientation profiles and attribution of disability when the level of knowledge was not controlled for.