Motivation and performance in context: The influence of goal orientations and instructional setting on situational appraisals and task performance

The purpose of this study was to examine how students with different goal orientation patterns perform in a complex problem solving task under different instructional conditions. Ninth-grade students (N=143) performed a complex problem solving task after receiving either task-involving or ego-involving instructions. It was assumed that students emphasizing performance and avoidance goals (or both) would produce less positive situational appraisals than students emphasizing learning goals, and that these differences would be greater in the ego-involving condition. Consistent with the assumptions, higher levels of interest and self-efficacy were associated with the task-involving condition, while more self-handicaps were claimed in the ego-involving condition. Also as expected, the detrimental consequences of the ego-involving condition were most accentuated for performance-oriented students. In general, the results support the idea of multiple goals and multiple pathways. That is, students with different goal orientation patterns experienced task situations differently - even with no differences in their performance - and the degree and quality of these differences varied as a function of the instructional condition.