THE POWER OF GOAL ORIENTATION IN PREDICTING STUDENT MATHEMATICS ACHIEVEMENT

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between student achievement in mathematics, and student social economic status (SES) and goal orientation. The data used in this study is derived from 2005 TASA-MA pilot testing for the sixth-grade students. The result suggested that the better performance in mathematics tended to be associated with higher SES and more mastery-oriented goal orientation. SES factor accounts for 3.3% of the variance, and student goal orientation accounts for additional 11% of the variance. The major implication obtained from this study is that goal orientation is much more significant than SES in predicting student performance in mathematics.