Interplay Between Personal Goals and Classroom Goal Structures in Predicting Student Outcomes: A Multilevel Analysis of Person-Context Interactions

This study examined cross-level interactions between personal goals and classroom goal structures, as well as their additive contributions to predicting math achievement, engagement, interest, effort withdrawal, and avoidance coping, using a sample of 3,943 Grade 5 students from 130 classrooms. Results of hierarchical linear modeling showed that classroom performance goal structures exacerbated (a) the negative association between personal performance-avoidance goals and engagement and (b) the positive relations of personal performance-avoidance goals to effort withdrawal and avoidance coping. Moreover, both classroom performance goal structures and personal performance-avoidance goals had maladaptive patterns of relations to outcomes at their respective levels of analysis, whereas classroom mastery goal structures and personal mastery goals showed adaptive relations. Our findings underscore the importance of a multilevel interactionist perspective in understanding achievement motivation and making recommendations for educational practices.