ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors proposed a theoretical framework of Chinese achievement goals and argued that, in the societies influenced by Confucian culture, people are expected to continuously expend great effort to achieve a special kind of goals: vertical goals. A vertical goal is socially constructed and is characterized by high expectations from significant others and strong sense of role obligation. In those societies, pursuing academic achievement is often regarded as a student’s vertical goal. Therefore, when pursuing academic goals, students may develop two beliefs about effort: obligation-oriented belief of effort (i.e., believing that effort-making is a student’s role obligation) and improvement-oriented belief of effort (i.e., believing that effort can conquer one’s limitations and improve one’s academic performance). The main aim of the study is to investigate the predictive effects of undergraduates’ beliefs of effort on their emotional, attributional, and behavioral reactions toward academic failure. A total of 475 undergraduates from five universities in Taiwan participated in this study. Participants were asked to recall an academic failure event and answer about their indebtedness feelings to oneself/parents, effort attribution, and striving behavior after the failure event. Results showed that (1) students’ obligation-oriented belief of effort was positively correlated with their indebtedness feelings to oneself/parents and striving behavior after academic failure, (2) students’ improvement-oriented belief of effort was positively correlated with their effort attribution and indebtedness feelings to oneself, and (3) students’ belief about entity theory of intelligence was negatively correlated with their effort attribution.
