Chapter 8: Personal Investment, Culture, and Learning: Insights Into the Most Salient Influences on School Achievement Across Cultural Groups

Personal Investment Theory is a multifaceted theory of motivation in which three key components: achievement goals (mastery, performance, social and extrinsic), facilitating conditions (parent support, teacher support, peer support), and sense of self (sense of purpose, sense of reliance, negative selfesteem, positive self-esteem), interact to engage students in the process of learning. In this study, achievement goal profiles of four cultural groupings (Australian Anglo, Indigenous Aboriginal, Lebanese-background, and Asianbackground) attending 11 high schools in Australia were compared within a Personal Investment Theory framework. Differences were also examined in sense of self, facilitating conditions, and several outcome measures (affect/ engagement and achievement/participation) in order to explore cultural group differences across all components of the Personal Investment model.