title: Reading Achievement, Mastery, and Performance Goal Structures Among Students With Learning Disabilities: A Nonlinear Perspective.
abstract: The purpose of the present study was to examine the hypothesis that a nonlinear relationship exists between a performance-classroom climate and the reading achievement of adolescent students with learning disabilities (LD). Participants were 62 students with LD (Grades 5-9) from public elementary schools in northern Greece. Classroom climate was assessed using the Patterns of Adaptive Learning Styles. Achievement in reading was assessed using a normative reading assessment. Data were analyzed by means of catastrophe theory in which the behavior is predicted as a function of two control variables, the asymmetry factor and the bifurcation factor. Reading achievement (word identification) was predicted by students' ability to decode pseudowords (asymmetry variable) and by a mastery or performance motivational discourse (bifurcation factor). Results indicated that in classrooms with a performance goal structure, the cusp model fit the data and accounted for 54% of the variance in real word identification. In this condition, the association between pseudoword reading and real word reading was nonlinear. When a mastery climate was tested as a bifurcation variable, results indicated that its effect was nonsignificant and that instead the linear model fitted the data more adequately. Thus, increases in a classroom's performance motivational discourse are associated with sudden, unpredictable, and discontinued changes in students' reading performance.
authors: Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, MA, USA georgios.sideridis@childrens.harvard.edu.
authors: Georgios D
authors: GD
authors: Sideridis
authors: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.
authors: Dimitrios
authors: D
authors: Stamovlasis
authors: University of Athens, Greece.
authors: Faye
authors: F
authors: Antoniou
mesh_terms: D000124:Achievement; D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D006115:Greece / Q000453:epidemiology; D006801:Humans; D007859:Learning Disabilities / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology; D008297:Male; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011932:Reading; D013334:Students
keywords: achievement goal theory; catastrophe; chaos theory; classroom climate; cusp model; goal structures; motivational discourse