Chapter 8: A Model of Culture and Achievement Behavior

This chapter presents a series of systematic research designed to explore cultural, situational, and contextual influences on student achievement behavior as well as the applicability of Western theories of achievement motivation to other cultures. The results of these studies showed that achievement motivation is a complex construct that is influenced by many interacting factors and cannot be explained by the traditional theories. These factors influence achievement behavior at many levels. At the classroom and school levels, we provided evidence that teacher evaluative behavior affected intrinsic/continuing motivation and causal attributions for achievement. At the societal level the findings showed that development of achievement judgment is different in different cultures studied. Several cross-cultural studies using different approaches provided evidence that while dimensions of achievement is the same for the cultures studied, achievement may mean different things in different cultures and people of all cultures can have many different achievement goals at the same time. These goals and dimensions fall into two broad categories: individualistic and affiliative goals and three dimensions: outcome of achievement, instrumental activities, and causal attribution for achievement respectively. The two categories of achievement are related to each other in different ways for different cultures. Different types of achievement goals produce different outcome, require different activities and are attributed to different causes. Based on these results we proposed a model of achievement behavior that can apply to both socially-oriented and individ-ualistically-oriented cultures. The model takes into account both affiliative and individualistic achievement goals, and the three dimensions of achievement. Further interesting evidence supporting these findings were provided through the semantic differential (SD) study.