|
Academic goals directed personal
attribution and the interpretations of internally and
externally negative emotions, which was thought to have
great impacts on learning. Personal and contextual factors
may interplay with each other, and result in joint effects
on mathematics achievement. The cross-level interactions of
personal level variables (gender, academic goals,
attribution, and emotional state-orientation personality for
students) and context level variables (emotional
state-orientation personality for teachers and the negative
emotional transmission) on mathematics achievement were
investigated in present study. Three hypotheses of
cross-level interactions erected around three academic goals
were tested: the inversing hypothesis, the minimizing
hypothesis, and the reinforcing hypothesis. The large
database composed of 14,461 high school students nested
within 946 classes was adopted to provide substantial
empirical evidences. Owing to hierarchical structures of the
data, potential similarity within classes in math
achievement, and the likely presence of cross-level
interactions, the multilevel analysis were introduced. The
results indicated that there were considerably variances
within classes in math achievement, and most of residual
variance (71.92%) could be explained by individual and
contextual level variables. The cross-level interactions of
inversing hypothesis was supported, it suggested that
students who possessed learning goal could inverse the
negative effect of negative emotional information and
resulted in better mathematics achievement. The minimizing
hypothesis and reinforcing hypothesis for students who
possessed social goal were partly supported, because gender
effect was not significant. It meant that the negative
effects of intrinsically and extrinsically negative
emotional information may be minimized when they proceed
efforts attribution. If, however, they proceeded ability
attribution, the negative effect of negative emotional
information would be reinforced. Likewise, the reinforcing
hypothesis for students who explicitly lacked goal and
proceeded ability attribution was also evidenced identical
reinforcing negative effect. Implications for practice and
future researches were also discussed.
Keywords: Academic Goals, Attribution, emotional
state-orientation personality, negative emotional
transmission, multilevel analysis
|
