Personality and performance goals in primary education students

Abstract

There are a large majority of studies that relate goals to learning factors, including performance. Another group of research seeks how certain personal factors determine a type of goal. With regard to personal factors, authors such as Harackiewicz, Barron, Tauer, Carter and Elliot (2000) argue that the goals that students maintain depend on personal variables, considering them as stable and dispositional constructs. As an objective, we have considered studying the relationship between performance goals (performance goals, or goals centered on the self) and the different personality traits in primary education students. This research involved 550 students of 5th and 6th grade of Primary Education. The mean age was 10.73 years (SD = .632, range 10-12); 47.5% female and 52.5% male. The “Performance Goals” factor of the Achievement Goal Questionnaire (Hayamizu Weiner, 1991) and the BFQ-NA Personality Questionnaire (Del Barrio, Carrasco, Holgado, 2006) have been used. The ANOVA shows that subjects with high performance goals achieve higher scores (p 0.005) than those with low scores in all factors except for the emotional instability factor, in which subjects with low performance goals obtain scores (p = 0.037) greater. The results obtained show a clear associationMbetween the performance goals of primary education students and the different personality factors. In this way, those children with high performance goals, their personality would be characterized by greater autonomy, perseverance, commitment, creativity, enthusiasm, self-confidence, sociability, enthusiasm or prosociability and less neuroticism and anxiety. These results coincide partially with other studies that find correlations between performance goals and awareness (Chen Zhang, 2011; McCabe, Van Yperen, Elliot, Verbraak, 2013)

Keywords

• metas académicas
• metas de rendimiento
• personalidad
• alumnos
• educación primaria