High-achieving students: Their motivational goals, self-regulation and achievement and relationships to their teachers' goals and strategy-based instruction

This study examines sixth grade high-achievers' goal orientations, knowledge and usage of strategies and the relationship among their teachers' classroom goal orientations and strategy-based instruction and their goal orientations, self-regulated learning and achievement. Participants were 566 high-achieving students and their 32 Primary 6 teachers in 34 Singapore schools. Each student responded to The Personal Goals Scale adapted from Nicholls, Patashnick and Nolen (1985) and the Self-Regulated Learning Strategies Scale of Youlden and Chan (1994) while each teacher responded to the Teachers' Classroom Practices Scale developed by Ee (1998). Students' achievement was obtained from their standardized Primary Six Leaving School Examination (PSLE). PRELIS and LISREL7 (Joreskog & Sorbom, 1989) were used to form one-factor congeneric models. The pattern of influence of the teacher and student variables on achievement was examined using multi-level modeling (Mln) (Woodhouse, Rasbash, Goldstein & Yang, 1995) to cater for the hierarchical structure of the data. The results and implications of the study are discussed. Copyright © 2003 Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business.