Chapter 3: Sociocultural Influences on Achievement Goal Adoption and Regulation: A Goal Complex Perspective

The achievement goal perspective has been one of the “big” theories of academic motivation in the past 4 decades. Theoretical and conceptual work, supported by an accumulating body of empirical evidence, has attested to the importance of the achievement goals that students pursue (i.e., goal adoption) and of the implications of this goal pursuit for achievement-related processes and outcomes (i.e., goal regulation; see Elliot & Hulleman, 2017; Liem, Lau, & Cai, 2016 for reviews). While the centrality of achievement goals as a motivational construct has been studied across Eastern and Western societies, there has been speculation that sociocultural contexts may account for cross-cultural variability in the degree to which different goals are adopted and the degree to which regulatory processes and outcomes are associated with the pursuit of these goals (Dekker & Fischer, 2008; King & McInerney, 2014; Maehr & Nicholls, 1980; Zusho & Clayton, 2011).