School motivation and achievement: the impact of academic goals, learning strategies and self-efficiency.

This paper aims to analyse the impact of personal variables related to the academic goals and learning strategies of secondary school pupils on their academic achievement. This paper is relevant because of the importance which motivational variables have for achievement in school contexts. The study uses a sample of pupils from the north of Portugal and Galicia in north-western Spain. Subscales from Academic Goals and Learning Strategies and Self-Efficiency have been used based on the Refema-57 Scale. The results suggest that the academic learning goals and the auto-efficiency strategies may be viewed as decisive positive factors of academic achievement. The social valuation and shallow learning strategies also have an impact, but it is a negative one (pre-exam anxiety). This set of variables of the pupils' personal variables, in its turn, accounts for about 30% of the variance of the global academic achievement of pupils in the north of Portugal. This percentage lands at roughly 15% where Galician pupils are concerned. In these pupil samples, other variables than the family, the school, the curriculum or the teacher will also prove o be significant. The relevant conclusion reached here point to the academic goals and the learning strategies as well as self-efficiency as being indicators of and decisive factors for academic achievement.