The advantages and disadvantages of ability grouping for student achievement are strongly contested, with studies presenting different results. However, much of this research has focused on class-level or subject-level ability grouping. Relatively less research has focused on school-level ability grouping. More importantly, the role of teacher…

Studies on utility value, metacognitive strategies, and achievement have usually examined these variables in a static manner. However, each of these variables changes across time and the relationships among them are dynamic. Hence, studies that examine changes in individual trajectories (change in each variable over time) and concurrent…

This study investigated the relationships between students' self-efficacy and self-concept for learning languages and students' academic achievement in learning English and Chinese. 1092 eighth to eleventh graders from four Hong Kong secondary schools completed questionnaires reporting their self-efficacy, self-concept and academic results for…

Background: Goal theory research has mostly focused on the unidirectional effects of goals on learning strategies and academic achievement. Reciprocal relationships have mostly been neglected. Aims: The primary aim of this study was to examine the reciprocal relations and causal ordering of mastery goals, metacognitive strategy use, and academic…

Achievement goal theory has long been a dominant model in the study of student motivation. However, a relatively small number of researchers have investigated gender differences in achievement goals or have considered the possible role that social and extrinsic goals may play in student academic motivation. Adopting a person-centered multiple…

Research on intrinsic and extrinsic future goals has mostly focused on their impact on wellbeing with relatively lesser attention being focused on key learning outcomes. This study investigates how the pursuit of different future goals (i.e., society-, family-, career-, wealth-, and fame-oriented goals) affects students' self-control, and whether…

The aims of this study were to examine changes in students' English and math self-concepts and to investigate the effects of gender and school ability level on these changes. Self-concept in English and math were measured thrice across three years among a sample of 2618 secondary school students from Hong Kong. Gender and school ability level were…

The study examined the relations between academic achievement and self-concepts in a sample of 1,067 seventh-grade students from 3 core ability streams in Singapore secondary education. Although between-stream differences in achievement were large, between-stream differences in academic self-concepts were negligible. Within each stream, levels of…

Background: Prior cross-cultural research with students in different national contexts (Australia and China) has shown consistency in the extent to which individual personal best (PB) goals are associated with engagement at school. Aims: This study extends this work to a multicultural context, assessing perceived PB goal structure in school and…

This article reports on the findings of an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded research project, "Building the future for Indigenous students", an investigation of the hopes and dreams for the future of over 1,000 secondary students, 733 of whom were Indigenous, living in very remote, remote, and urban locations in the Northern…

The big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE) posits that students with the same ability will have higher academic self-concepts when they are in low-ability classes than in high-ability classes. Our research puts the BFLPE under scrutiny by examining goal orientations as the moderators that may affect the size of the BFLPE. We collected data on…

Research on implicit theories of intelligence and academic emotions have proceeded in parallel with little cross-over of ideas. This study aims to examine the potential synergies that may exist between these two strands of research by examining whether implicit theories of intelligence can function as a predictor of academic emotions when situated…

Much of the research on achievement goal theory has focused on the roles of mastery and performance goals in academic engagement, thus the role of other goals such as social goals has mostly been neglected. The aim of this research was to investigate the effects of different kinds of social goals (affiliation, approval, concern, responsibility and…

The big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE) was evaluated with 4,461 seventh to ninth graders in Singapore where a national policy of ability streaming is implemented. Consistent with the BFLPE, when prior achievement was controlled, students in the high-ability stream had lower English and mathematics self-concepts (ESCs and MSCs) and those in the…

This study examined the prediction of academic self-concept (English and Mathematics) and learning strategies (deep and surface), and their direction of effect, on academic achievement (English and Mathematics) of 8,354 students from 16 secondary schools in Hong Kong. Two competing models were tested to ascertain the direction of effect: Model A…