Investigating the effects of individual interest and goal-orientation on ordinary and worthy performance

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2018

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Akbay, Tuncer

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This dissertation aimed to investigate whether individual interest and achievementgoal orientations facilitate learning and task performance. Through quasi experimental design, we tested the hypothesized effects of individual interest, achievement-goal orientations, and their interactions on rote learning, meaningful learning, and worthy performance distinctly. In this investigation, 187 participants were grouped based upon their individual interest levels (high vs low) and achievement-goal orientations (achievement-mastery vs achievement-performance) toward four-weeks lasting Online Critical Information Seeking and Reporting course. Participants’ achievement goals were preserved and even sharpened while they were taking the course through respective manipulations. The research revealed achievement-goal orientation has moderate effect on rote learning outcomes in favor of performance-goal orientated participants. In similar vein, high interested participants’ rote learning outcome mean score was significantly higher than low interested participants’ rote learning outcome mean score. Then, in a second research line, the study revealed statistically significant individual interest and interaction effects (individual interest*achievement-goal orientation) on meaningful learning outcomes of participants. Therefore, we chose to ignore the individual interest main effect and instead examined the individual interest simple main effects—which is the investigation of individual interest effects on mastery-goal and performance-goal conditions separately. These analyses assured that individual interest has high effect on meaningful learning outcomes within only mastery-goal oriented participants in favor of high individual interest. Additionally, experiment performed in a computer laboratory setting has provided an empirical evidence that, participants with the higher level of individual interests demonstrated higher worthy performance (task performance divided by exerted cognitive effort) than the participants with lower level individual interest. The results of the study also indicated that mastery-goal oriented participants performed significantly higher on the performance task than performance-goal oriented participants as long as the performance is considered along with its cognitive cost.

Subject Keywords

Educational psychology., Achievement motivation., Learning, Psychology of., Individual differences., Cognitive learning.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12622899/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/27861

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

T. Akbay, “Investigating the effects of individual interest and goal-orientation on ordinary and worthy performance,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2018.