title: Academic goals and learning quality in higher education students.
abstract: In this paper, the relations between academic goals and various indicators that define the quality of the learning process are analyzed. The purpose was to determine to what extent high, moderate, or low levels of academic goals were positively or negatively related to effort regulation, the value assigned to academic tasks, meta-cognitive self-regulation, self-efficacy, beliefs about learning control, and management of time and study environment. The investigation was carried out with a sample of 632 university students (70% female and 30% male) and mean age of 21.22 (SD=2.2).The results show that learning goals, or task orientation, are positively related to all the indictors of learning quality considered herein. Although for other kinds of goals-work-avoidance goals, performance-approach goals, and performance-avoidance goals-significant relations were not found with all the indicators, there was a similar tendency of significant results in all cases; the higher the levels of these goals, the lower the levels of the indicators of learning quality.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Universidad de A Coruña, Spain. vallar@udc.es
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Valle
authors.forename: José C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Núñez
authors.forename: Ramón G
authors.initials: RG
authors.lastname: Cabanach
authors.forename: Julio A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: González-Pienda
authors.forename: Susana
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Rodríguez
authors.forename: Pedro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rosário
authors.forename: María A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Muñoz-Cadavid
authors.forename: Rebeca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Cerezo
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001290:Attitude; D004521:Educational Measurement; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D020377:Self Efficacy; D012931:Social Environment; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013997:Time Factors; D014495:Universities; D014937:Work / Q000523:psychology