Multiple-goal pursuit and its relation to cognitive, self-regulatory, and motivational strategies

The topic of academic goals has provided very important information about students' motivation. Traditional research has described several mutually exclusive goals that elicit different motivational patterns. Nevertheless, goal-orientation research has reported the possibility that more than one goal may operate simultaneously.

The purpose of this study was to characterise multiple-goal groups of students, who use various types of cognitive, self-regulatory, and motivational strategies.

Participants were 595 Spanish-speaking university students at the University of A Coruña.

In order to examine the relationships between goal orientations and strategies, a Pearson correlational analysis was performed. Then, a cluster analysis was performed to identify potential subgroups of students with more than one simultaneously operative goal. Finally, a one-way test was conducted to determine whether the multiple-goal clusters differed in any of the nine strategies.

Only those students who reported high task orientation tended to exhibit more frequent use of cognitive and self-regulatory strategies. Nevertheless, this does not mean that learning processes are only optimised by task orientation. When multiple-goal adoption was considered, students who developed the most positive self-regulation were characterised by their focus on learning, but also by their desire to avoid being judged negatively by others.

Students should not adopt only task goals, which are sometimes overvalued, but also other kinds of goals that allow them to manage their learning and make it more flexible in each situation. This aspect characterises self-regulated learning, which is defined not only by cognitive and behavioural regulation but also by motivational regulation.