Analysis of the goals for school children in primary and secondary school

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This work is based on two contexts regarding school learners motivation: the attribution theory by Weiner (1986, 1995) and the contributions made by Dweck (1986) about the goals schoolchildren expect to reach. The main aim of this work is to find the goals shown by primary and secondary school students during their learning stage, the relations these goals hold with the different causal dimensions and if there exist differences between the primary schoolchildren’s goals and those of the secondary school learners. The sample we have investigated consists of 722 students of both primary and secondary school. The results obtained indicate that their goals happen to be the same as those found in other contexts but that differences appear depending on the learning stage.