Effects of Attribute Affirmation and Achievement Goals on High School Students' Motivation

Cheng-Hong Liu; Po-Sheng Huang; Xian-Rui Yin; Fa-Chung Chiu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661668

Effects of Attribute Affirmation and Achievement Goals on High School Students' Motivation

Front Psychol. 2021 Aug 24:12:661668. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661668. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Cheng-Hong Liu¹, Po-Sheng Huang^{2

3}, Xian-Rui Yin¹, Fa-Chung Chiu⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
² Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei City, Taiwan.
³ Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei City, Taiwan.
⁴ Department of Counseling Psychology, Chinese Culture University, Taipei City, Taiwan.

Abstract

Researchers have suggested that receiving attribute affirmation (AA) may increase the motivation of students to confront a challenge. However, we posited that to determine whether AA increases the motivation of students to confront a challenging task, we must consider dispositional achievement goals of the students. The participants were 171 junior-high-school students, randomly assigned to an AA or no affirmation condition. The results showed that AA enhanced the tendency to confront a challenging task for students who endorsed low mastery-approach goals (MAGs) and low performance-approach goals (PAGs) simultaneously (b = 0.5, p = 0.015). The effect was mainly mediated by the increasing state performance-approach goals (SPAGs) in confronting the task (indirect effect = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.04-0.49); however, being attribute-affirmed decreased the tendency to confront the challenging task for students adopting a dominant PAG orientation (b = -0.76, p = 0.049). In addition, for students adopting a dominant MAG orientation or adopting high MAGs and high PAGs simultaneously, no difference was noted in the tendency to confront the task between participants in the control and attribute-affirmed conditions.

Keywords: achievement goals; attribute affirmation; challenging tasks; motivation; self-affirmation.