ABSTRACT
At the end of the 1980s, goal theory emerged to explain student motivation in an educational setting. In Paul Pintrich's view, this motivation had three components, namely: “value (including task value and achievement goal orientation), expectancies (including control beliefs, self-efficacy beliefs, and expectancy for success), and affect (focusing primarily on test anxiety and self-esteem)”. Pintrich shows in his article on goal orientation that students have different reasons for starting on a task that can be divided into two categories: namely learning or performing. Building on Carol Dweck and E. Leggett’s work on motivation and learning Pintrich’s work concerned the motivation that students need to start working on a task at all: the so-called goal orientation. Research carried out by Pintrich and his colleagues has revealed that these different goal orientations are related to different outcomes in the class such as grades, motivation, choice of strategy, and so forth.
