Uncovering vocational students’ multiple goal profiles in the learning of professional mathematics: differences in learning strategies, motivational beliefs and cognitive abilities

Abstract

Motivation to learn in vocational education is underexplored by researchers in educational psychology. Yet, teachers would profit from an understanding of the goals apprentices adopt for their learning and how these goals relate to students’ learning strategies and abilities. Using latent profile analysis, four groups were identified based on the achievement goals of 263 vocational students in their professional mathematics courses. Groups were described regarding their cognitive abilities, learning strategies and motivational beliefs. Results indicated that the inclusion of challenge-mastery and work-avoidance goals adds value to previous conceptualizations of multiple goal profiles. Significant and large differences between the profiles were found with regard to such motivational beliefs as individual interest and significant, albeit smaller, differences were found for learning strategies and cognitive abilities. The results suggest that vocational students may adopt four specific combinations of goals and that these are associated with several variables important for successful learning. Implications of the findings for vocational education are discussed.

Keywords:

• achievement goals
• multiple goals
• motivational beliefs
• learning strategies
• cognitive abilities

Acknowledgements

I thank Kara Makara and Stuart Karabenick for their insightful suggestions and help in the correction of English.

Notes

1. The complete scales in French are available from the author.

2. The scores were first checked for the presence of multivariate outliers using Mahalanobis distance measure (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007), but none were identified. Furthermore, the Maximum Likelihood Robust estimator available in Mplus 5.0 (Muthén & Muthén, 2007) was used to take into account deviations from multivariate normality.

3. Challenge-mastery goals were distinct from mastery-approach, in that the labels refer to the wish to be confronted with difficult tasks and not only to understand and master the tasks (Grant & Dweck, 2003).