Browsing by Author "Lappi, Reetta"

The aim of this study was to investigate which goal orientation has effects on the school's 8th - 9th grade students' feelings of autonomy. This was studied in all 8th - 9th grade students'. Previous studies have shown that motivation is a complicated process. It is affected by students' goals, expectations, intrinsic motivation, and experience of autonomy and assessments of ones abilities, self-esteem and fear of failure. Motivation was explained by goal orientation theory and self-determination theory. The data was collected using quantitative methods. All study subjects were eight and ninth graders (N202) in one Finnish middle school. Data was collected in Autumn 2010 of all the school's eight and night graders by paper questionnaire. Data from the questionnaires was put in to IBM SPSS Statistics 21 software, which was used for analysis. Factor analysis, correlation matrix and regression analysis were used for research method. Main results of this study were that differently goal oriented students experience autonomy in learning differently. Student who have positive attitudes towards school tend to experience more autonomy in learning than student who have more negative attitudes towards school. Mastery orientation predicts student's experiences of teachers help and experiences of autonomy the best. Performance orientation, performance approach and performance avoidance goal correlated positively with of teachers help and experiences of autonomy. Work-avoidance goal correlated negatively with experiences of teachers help.