title: Achievement strategies at school: types and correlates.
abstract: In this study we made an effort to identify the kinds of strategies adolescents deploy in achievement context in an unselected sample of Swedish adolescents. The participants were 880 14-15-year-old comprehensive school students (399 boys and 481 girls) from a middle-sized town in central Sweden. Six groups of adolescents were identified according to the strategies they deployed. Four of them, i.e. optimistic, defensive pessimistic, self-handicapping and learned helplessness strategies, were similar to those described previously in the literature. The results showed that membership in the functional strategy groups, such as in mastery-oriented and defensive pessimist groups, was associated with well-being, school adjustment and achievement, and low levels of norm-breaking behaviour. By contrast, membership in the dysfunctional, for example self-handicapping and learned helplessness strategy groups, was associated with low levels of well-being, and of school adjustment, and a higher level of norm-breaking behaviour.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. sjmaatta@psyka.jyu.fi
authors: Sami
authors: S
authors: Määttä
authors: Häkan
authors: H
authors: Stattin
authors: Jari-Erik
authors: JE
authors: Nurmi
mesh_terms: D000124:Achievement; D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000293:Adolescent; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D000297:Psychology, Adolescent; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*; D013548:Sweden