Taiwanese Students' Self-Attributions for Two Types of Achievement Goals

摘要

Previous studies of achievement motivations have focused on the patterns ofself-attribution with little consideration of the effects of achievement goals. In the presentstudy, the authors investigated Taiwanese students' self-attribution for achievement goalsmainly on the basis of autonomous interest (i.e., personal goals) and on social expectation(i.e., vertical goals). The authors administered self-developed scenario simulation ques-tionnaires to undergraduate and graduate participants in 2 studies. The results showed that(a) in pursuit of personal goals, participants tended to attribute success to internal factorsand failure to external factors and (b) in pursuit of vertical goals, participants tended toattribute their failure to lack of effort. The authors further discuss the theoretical implica-tions of these findings under a cultural context.