Perfectionism and achievement goals revisited: The 3 × 2 achievement goal framework

ObjectivesPerfectionistic strivings (PS) and perfectionistic concerns (PC) have shown different profiles with the 2 × 2 achievement goals in sport. Whether PS and PC also show comparable profiles with the achievement goals of the expanded 3 × 2 framework, however, is unclear.DesignCross-sectional.MethodWe examined self-reported perfectionistic strivings, perfectionistic concerns, and the 3 × 2 achievement goals in 136 junior athletes (mean age 17.0 years).ResultsThe results of structural equation modeling showed that PS were positively associated with task-, self-, and other-approach goals and negatively with task- and self-avoidance goals. In contrast, PC were positively associated with task-, self-, and other-avoidance goals and negatively with task- and self-approach goals.ConclusionsThe findings suggest that PS and PC show different profiles also with the 3 × 2 achievement goals which may help explain why the two perfectionism dimensions show differential relations with achievement-related outcomes in sport.     

Structural and socio-psychological influences on adolescents’ educational aspirations and subsequent academic achievement

Previous literature indicates that educational aspirations are an important predictor of achievement at school and beyond. This paper examines the factors that are associated with high educational aspirations. It also looks at the relationship between aspirations and achievement at the General Certificate of Secondary Education in a deprived area of London. The results show that educational aspirations are associated with individual characteristics. Girls were more likely than boys to express a wish to remain in education beyond the age of 16. For the most academic route post-16, there were substantial ethnic differences, with minority ethnic groups generally being more likely to state a desire to follow this path. Students who were eligible for free school meals tended to have lower aspirations. Socio-psychological variables were also shown to be of importance, particularly self-esteem and psychological distress. Importantly, educational aspirations had a strong association with actual achievement at age 16, remaining associated even after controlling for a number of other variables, including prior achievement. These findings are discussed in light of previous research and potential intervention strategies.     

Subjectivist – observing and objective – participant perspectives on the world: Kant,aquinas and quantum mechanics

Theological thinking is influenced by perspectives on the relation of scientific knowledge to reality. Two paradigms for understanding the nature of human knowledge are considered in relation to quantum mechanics: the subjective-observing perspective of Kant, and the objective-participant perspective of Thomas Aquinas. I discuss whether quantum mechanics necessarily implies a subject centered perspective on reality, and argue, with reference to d'Espagnat's notion of veiled reality, that quantum non-separability challenges this view. I then explore whether the objective-participant perspective of Thomas Aquinas provides a more fruitful context for understanding quantum mechanics. I discuss quantum measurement in terms of the transition from potentiality to actuality, and knowledge as the latent intelligibility of the world realized. However, the negative nature of our knowledge of quantum non-separability also challenges this perspective. Our theological thinking in response to quantum knowledge must therefore proceed tentatively, balancing a via positiva, with a via negativa.     

Fear of success and failure,or norms for achievement?

Previous research has indicated that success in competitive situations is differentially perceived, considering the level of success and sex of person who succeeded. The amount of projected negative imagery of 100 college students under various degrees of a man's or woman's failure in medical school was investigated in the present study. Data indicated a pervasive tendency to downgrade unsuccessful men in relation to unsuccessful women. The possibility that subjects' responses reflect anxiety about the level of success and failure obtained, rather than anxiety about success and failure in general, is discussed.The authors thank D. F. Ricks for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Portions of this article were presented at the 6th Annual Conference for Research on Women and Education, Pacific Grove, California, December, 1980.     

Family background and academic achievement: does self-efficacy mediate outcomes?

Research indicates both family background and self-efficacy influence academic outcomes; however, family background also impacts self-efficacy development. The purpose of the current study was to establish whether self-efficacy mediates the relationship between family background and academic achievement. Results indicated family background features were not robust predictors of academic achievement in the current sample, which limited testable mediation pathways. Evidence was found that self-efficacy does mediate the relationship between parental involvement and expectations of academic success. Results also indicated self-efficacy is a strong and consistent predictor of grade point average and expectations of academic success. Based on these findings, it is recommended educators utilize previously developed classroom strategies which have been shown to enhance students’ self-efficacy levels.     

Motivational climate and changes in young athletes’ achievement goal orientations

Development of achievement-related motives in young athletes is believed to be influenced by the motivational climate created by coaches. In a longitudinal multilevel design utilizing 47 youth basketball teams, coach-initiated motivational climate was used to predict changes in 9–13 year old athletes’ achievement goal orientations over the course of a season. Mastery climate scores on the Motivational Climate Scale for Youth Sports were associated with significant increases in mastery goal orientation and decreases in ego orientation scores on the Achievement Goal Scale for Youth Sports. Ego motivational climate scores were significantly related to increases in ego goal orientation scores. These relations were not influenced by athletes’ age or gender. Intraclass correlations indicated low within-team consensus in athletes’ motivational climate scores, suggesting an individual- rather than team-level perceptual construct. These and other findings indicate that achievement goal orientation research can be extended downward to children below the age of 11.

On Similarity Coefficients for 2×2 Tables and Correction for Chance

This paper studies correction for chance in coefficients that are linear functions of the observed proportion of agreement. The paper unifies and extends various results on correction for chance in the literature. A specific class of coefficients is used to illustrate the results derived in this paper. Coefficients in this class, e.g. the simple matching coefficient and the Dice/Sørenson coefficient, become equivalent after correction for chance, irrespective of what expectation is used. The coefficients become either Cohen’s kappa, Scott’s pi, Mak’s rho, Goodman and Kruskal’s lambda, or Hamann’s eta, depending on what expectation is considered appropriate. Both a multicategorical generalization and a multivariate generalization are discussed.     

Bringing culture to the nation: Hebraism, Yiddishism, and the dilemmas of Jewish cultural formation in Russia and Ukraine, 1917–1919

Focusing on the pivotal 1917–1919 conjuncture in Russia and Ukraine, this paper analyzes the efforts of the divided Jewish nationalist intelligentsia to disseminate new forms of Jewish culture to a mass audience, the reception of these efforts in the former Tsarist empire’s variegated Jewish population, and the intelligentsia’s parallel exploration of other forms of cultural formation less dependent on popular support. Comparing the cultural programs of Hebraism and Yiddishism, it demonstrates important parallels in their cultural visions and highlights their shared belief in the possibility of implanting a secularist, aestheticist intelligentsia culture in the whole of “the nation.” The paper reconstructs both substantial forms of popular openness to this culture and its sociocultural weaknesses. Finally, it examines experiments made by the intelligentsia with alternative routes to cultural transformation: suppression of popular culture, non-market cultural arrangements, cultural revolution through education, and the uses of the state. The paper seeks a fuller understanding both of the roots of interwar cultural programs in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and of the Jewish nationalist intelligentsia’s underlying conception of “culture,” its own authority, and the evolving relationship between these conceptions and the realities of East European Jewish social, cultural, and political life from the 1890s onward.     

On Association Coefficients for 2×2 Tables and Properties That Do Not Depend on the Marginal Distributions

We discuss properties that association coefficients may have in general, e.g., zero value under statistical independence, and we examine coefficients for 2×2 tables with respect to these properties. Furthermore, we study a family of coefficients that are linear transformations of the observed proportion of agreement given the marginal probabilities. This family includes the phi coefficient and Cohen’s kappa. The main result is that the linear transformations that set the value under independence at zero and the maximum value at unity, transform all coefficients in this family into the same underlying coefficient. This coefficient happens to be Loevinger’s H.     

Gingerbread Nuts and Pebbles: Frege and the Neo-Kantians – Two Recently Discovered Documents

We present and discuss two recently discovered pieces of correspondence by Frege: a postcard to Heinrich Rickert dated 1 July 1911 and a letter to Hinrich Knittermeyer dated 25 October 1912. The documents and their historical context shed new light on Frege's relation to the Neo-Kantians.     

The Barbour – Smith – Gilkey Paradox: Historical Relativity in Natural Science and Historical Religion

This paper is about the relation of historical relativity and religious certainty. To live in history and to live with historical relativity is to admit that we are subject to the limitations of creaturehood: we know right and wrong, truth and falsity, relative to our own time and place, history and culture, but we do not know any truth or right that is non-relative to time and place. The differences between historical and naturalistic discourses of explanation are radical, and usually overlooked by scientists.     

Academic achievement in Blacks and Whites: Are the developmental processes similar?

Genetic and environmental influences on academic achievement were investigated in four groups of siblings: (1) White full siblings, (2) White half-siblings, (3) Black full siblings, and (4) Black half-siblings. Our expectation was that the variances and covariances among three achievement tests would have the same structure across the four groups. This expectation was confirmed by a quantitative genetic model that imposed equal factor loadings across groups. This best fitting model had two factors: a Genetic factor representing genetic variation and a Shared Environment factor representing environmental differences among families. Reading recognition, reading comprehension, and mathematics tests all loaded on the Genetic factor, but primarily mathematics loaded on the Shared Environment factor. The quantitative genetic model was next fit to the achievement test means. Its successful fit suggested that the genetic and environmental influences involved in producing individual variation were the same as those producing the group-mean differences. In this sample, genes accounted for 66% to 74% of the observed group difference in verbal achievement and 36% of the difference in mathematics achievement. Shared environment accounted for the remainder, 34% to 26% of the difference in verbal achievement and 64% of that in mathematics achievement.     

The effect of self- and interpersonal emotion regulation on athletes’ anxiety and goal achievement in competition

ObjectivesThere exists a wealth of evidence that athletes must regulate their emotions for optimal performance and wellbeing. In addition to athletes’ attempts to regulate their own emotions, they may also attempt to regulate each other’s emotions (interpersonal emotion regulation). Though self- and interpersonal emotion regulation likely co-occur, previous research has not explored how these strategies concurrently impact athletes’ emotions and performance outcomes. In the current study, we examined whether athletes’ emotional self-regulation and the receipt of interpersonal emotion regulation from their teammates were related to their anxiety and goal achievement during competition.DesignQuantitative, cross-sectional retrospective survey design.MethodData were gathered following sport competitions from 509 participants from 50 interdependent sport teams from Canada and the UK (M_age = 19.0, SD = 3.1).ResultsAnalysis of the data using structural equation modeling revealed that after accounting for pre-competition anxiety, received interpersonal emotion regulation was not associated with anxiety during competition, though affect-worsening self-regulation was positively associated with anxiety during competition. Received interpersonal emotion regulation was also not associated with goal achievement, yet affect-improving and affect-worsening self-regulation were associated with goal achievement. Nevertheless, when the influence of emotional self-regulation on anxiety and goal achievement was set to zero, affect-improving and affect-worsening interpersonal emotion regulation were associated with anxiety during competition and affect-improving interpersonal emotion regulation was associated with goal achievement.ConclusionsThese data can be interpreted as evidence that emotion regulation actions between teammates are important for anxiety and performance outcomes, albeit this effect is attenuated in the presence of athletes’ own emotional self-regulation. These results extend the extant research on self- and interpersonal emotion regulation in sport, and in line with these observations, we highlight a number of future research opportunities for researchers examining emotion regulation in performance contexts.     

The impact of engineering identification and stereotypes on undergraduate women’s achievement and persistence in engineering

Women almost always comprise a minority in engineering programs and a smaller percentage of women pursue engineering than other science and technology majors. The culture of engineering departments and negative stereotypes of women’s engineering and mathematical ability have been identified as factors that inhibit women’s entry into engineering and cause them to leave the major. Even for women who stay, stereotype threat or the anxiety of confirming a negative stereotype can decrease academic performance. To more fully understand this dynamic, we examined four factors associated with stereotype threat (engineering identification, gender identification, gender stereotype endorsement, and engineering ability perceptions) to determine how they impacted women’s achievement and persistence in engineering at the end of their first year of an engineering program. Participants included 363 first-year general engineering students from a large public university. Students completed a questionnaire near the end of their first year. Results indicated that there were differences between men and women for gender stereotype endorsement and engineering ability perceptions, with men more likely to hold negative stereotypes of women’s engineering abilities and women more likely to report higher perceptions of their engineering abilities. Engineering identification was a significant predictor of persistence in engineering, and engineering ability perceptions were significant predictors of achievement; the relationships were stronger for women than men. The fact that neither gender identification nor gender stereotype endorsement were related to achievement or persistence in engineering indicated that they were less important factors for first-year women engineering students than engineering identification and engineering ability perceptions.     

Sufficiency and Conditional Estimation of Person Parameters in the Polytomous Rasch Model

Rasch models are characterised by sufficient statistics for all parameters. In the Rasch unidimensional model for two ordered categories, the parameterisation of the person and item is symmetrical and it is readily established that the total scores of a person and item are sufficient statistics for their respective parameters. In contrast, in the unidimensional polytomous Rasch model for more than two ordered categories, the parameterisation is not symmetrical. Specifically, each item has a vector of item parameters, one for each category, and each person only one person parameter. In addition, different items can have different numbers of categories and, therefore, different numbers of parameters. The sufficient statistic for the parameters of an item is itself a vector. In estimating the person parameters in presently available software, these sufficient statistics are not used to condition out the item parameters. This paper derives a conditional, pairwise, pseudo-likelihood and constructs estimates of the parameters of any number of persons which are independent of all item parameters and of the maximum scores of all items. It also shows that these estimates are consistent. Although Rasch’s original work began with equating tests using test scores, and not with items of a test, the polytomous Rasch model has not been applied in this way. Operationally, this is because the current approaches, in which item parameters are estimated first, cannot handle test data where there may be many scores with zero frequencies. A small simulation study shows that, when using the estimation equations derived in this paper, such a property of the data is no impediment to the application of the model at the level of tests. This opens up the possibility of using the polytomous Rasch model directly in equating test scores.     

Racial identity beliefs and academic achievement: does being black hold students back?

The examination of a student’s racial identity beliefs along with the extent to which being Black is a central part of his or her self-concept provides a novel, insightful approach to understanding the relationship between racial identity and academic achievement (Chavous et al., 2003,). Using Sellers et al. (1998a) Multi-dimensional Model of Black Identity (MMBI) as a framework, this study investigated racial centrality, public regard and private regard beliefs in relation to the grade point average of African–American high-school students. A total of 289 African–American students from a large urban district participated in this study. Cluster analyses conducted on the three subscales of the MMBI on separate samples of 9th and 12th grade students replicated three of four racial identity profile groups previously identified by Chavous et al. (2003). Additionally, among both 9th and 12th grade students, Alienated students achieved significantly higher grade point averages than did Idealized students.     

To master or perform? Exploring relations between achievement goals and conceptual change learning

Background. Research is needed to explore conceptual change in relation to achievement goal orientations and depth of processing. Aims. To address this need, we examined relations between achievement goals, use of deep versus shallow processing strategies, and conceptual change learning using a think‐aloud protocol. Sample and Method. Seventy‐three undergraduate students were assessed on their prior knowledge and misconceptions about Newtonian mechanics, and then reported their achievement goals and participated in think‐aloud protocols while reading Newtonian physics texts. Results. A mastery‐approach goal orientation positively predicted deep processing strategies, shallow processing strategies, and conceptual change. In contrast, a performance‐approach goal orientation did not predict either of the processing strategies, but negatively predicted conceptual change. A performance‐avoidance goal orientation negatively predicted deep processing strategies and conceptual change. Moreover, deep and shallow processing strategies positively predicted conceptual change as well as recall. Finally, both deep and shallow processing strategies mediated relations between mastery‐approach goals and conceptual change. Conclusions. Results provide some support for Dole and Sinatra's (1998) Cognitive Reconstruction of Knowledge Model of conceptual change but also challenge specific facets with regard to the role of depth of processing in conceptual change.