Ying-Tze Zheng
Institute of Education, Division of Educational Psychology National Chiao Tung University
The present study reviews the four categories of achievement goals proposed by Elliot and McGregor (2001), mastery-approach goals, mastery-avoidance goals, performance-approach goals, and performance-avoidance goals. Furthermore, the study investigates the associations between achievement goals and working memory through four research articles. All four research articles manipulate the achievement goals of their participants via experiments, and they test the working memory performance of their participants.Their results showed that mastery-approach groups had better performance,and that the performance of performance-related groups and avoidance-related groups was weaker. The results proposed that performance-goal-groups focused some of their attention on comparison with others, thus occupying parts of their working memory.The avoidance-goal-groups were afraid of some negative results,thus were more likely to trigger anxiety, which hindered their normal functioning of working memory. This article provides suggestions for further research confirming these two mechanisms.
Keywords: achievement goals, approach-avoidance, mastery-performance,working memory