scholarly journals Dark Pathways to Achievement in Science: Researchers’ Achievement Goals Predict Engagement in Questionable Research Practices

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 783-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Janke ◽  
Martin Daumiller ◽  
Selma Carolin Rudert

Questionable research practices (QRPs) are a strongly debated topic in the scientific community. Hypotheses about the relationship between individual differences and QRPs are plentiful but have rarely been empirically tested. Here, we investigate whether researchers’ personal motivation (expressed by achievement goals) is associated with self-reported engagement in QRPs within a sample of 217 psychology researchers. Appearance approach goals (striving for skill demonstration) positively predicted engagement in QRPs, while learning approach goals (striving for skill development) were a negative predictor. These effects remained stable when also considering Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy in a latent multiple regression model. Additional moderation analyses revealed that the more researchers favored publishing over scientific rigor, the stronger the association between appearance approach goals and engagement in QRPs. The findings deliver first insights into the nature of the relationship between personal motivation and scientific malpractice.

2006 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianmin Guan ◽  
Ping Xiang ◽  
Ron McBride ◽  
April Bruene

This study examined the relationship between achievement goals and social goals and explored how students’ achievement goals and social goals might affect their reported persistence and effort expended toward physical education in high school settings. Participants were 544 students from two high schools in the southwest U.S. Multiple regression analysis revealed that social responsibility goals represented the greatest contributor to students’ expenditure of persistence and effort toward physical education. This was followed by mastery-approach goals, mastery-avoidance goals, and performance-approach goals. In addition, girls reported significantly higher values on both social-relationship goals and responsibility goals than did boys. Findings revealed that students had multiple goals for wanting to succeed in physical education; using both achievement goals and social goals when studying student motivation and achievement in high school physical education settings is recommend.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Hein ◽  
Stefan Janke ◽  
Raven Rinas ◽  
Martin Daumiller ◽  
Markus Dresel ◽  
...  

Identifying what motivates higher education instructors in their self-regulated learning from stu-dent evaluations of teaching (SET) is important for improving future teaching. In a longitudinal online field study, we investigated how higher education instructors’ achievement goals predict the use of SET(s), processing its results and learning from it. We expected beneficial effects of learning (approach and avoidance) goals and performance approach goals, while performance avoidance goals and work avoidance goals should be detrimental for the learning process. In to-tal, 407 higher education instructors with teaching commitments reported their achievement goals. Out of these participants, 152 instructors voluntarily conducted SET(s) and subsequently reported their learning intentions regarding this student feedback. Using structural equation modelling, we found that learning avoidance goals were positively associated with conducting SET(s) and learning approach goals were positively associated with learning intentions. These findings highlight the importance of learning goals for instructors’ use of SET(s).


2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 484-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin H. Jones ◽  
Christian E. Mueller ◽  
Krystal L. McCutchen

The study examined the relationship among students’ focus in urban schools and three educationally relevant psychological factors: school engagement, achievement goals, and possible future self. A 1-year study at two urban high schools with a total of 212 participants suggested that academically focused students are more highly engaged with mastery-approach goals, whereas students with a social focus had less optimal engagement and more performance goal orientations. Both academic and social focus indicated strongest relationships with academic future self and social future self, respectively.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 183-190
Author(s):  
William Newton Suter

This article focuses on questionable research practices (QRPs) that bias findings and conclusions. QRPs cast doubt on the credibility of research findings in home health and nursing science in general. They assault the research integrity of all researchers to the extent they are permitted to exist at all. Each QRP is defined via bundles of specific research behaviors with unifying labels that include deceptive mirages and phantom sharpshooters among others. These questionable behaviors are described in ways that enhance research understanding and enable QRP avoidance by careful home health nurse researchers using higher standards of scientific rigor. QRPs impede scientific progress by generating false conclusions. They threaten the validity and dependability of scientific research and confuse other researchers who practice rigorous science and maintain integrity. QRPs also clog the literature with studies that cannot be replicated. When researchers engage in QRPs at the expense of rigor, overall trust in the scientific knowledge base erodes.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothea Wahyu Ariani

PurposeThis study aims to examine how students with different goals differ in their subjective well-being, including academic self-efficacy (ASE) and affect at school (AAS). There are four goal orientations that motivate students to achieve academic performance. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between the four dimensions of achievement goals (AGs), ASE and AAS. It also examined five relationship models between these variables.Design/methodology/approachThis study was conducted using a survey method with a questionnaire on 516 students at several private universities in Yogyakarta who have been studying for at least two years. After testing the validity and reliability of the measurements, correlation testing was conducted to determine the relationship between the two variables. Furthermore, testing of the five relationship models was conducted using structural equation modeling (SEM) with a two-step approach.FindingsThe findings showed that each goal was directly related to students' well-being with a diverse relationship nature. Furthermore, mastery-approach goals (MApGs) were the types that most consistently have a positive effect on students' well-being. Also, performance-avoidance goals (PAvGs) consistently and negatively affected students' well-being, while performance-approach goals (PApGs) produced various influences and relationships. In addition, mastery-avoidance goals (MAvGs) are among the four AGs that still need to be studied, especially in educational settings. This is because they had no effect on ASE either directly or indirectly.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitation of this study was using cross-sectional data and self-report in data collection. Furthermore, the respondents were limited to private university students, and they were few in number.Practical implicationsMApGs had a positive effect on ASE and AAS, while PAvGs can reduce ASE and cause negative effects. Therefore, higher institutions in Indonesia need to provide a curriculum that can increase students' curiosity, creativity and involvement in the learning process. This will make them confident in their abilities and have a positive attitude in school and the society. Also, this study showed that a PApG is not a negative goal because it can increase students' confidence in their abilities. This competency feeling needs to be fostered because it encourages them to increase knowledge and learning content, as well as increase their positive effects.Originality/valueThis paper addressed the need to understand how to generate and increase students’ motivation.


Author(s):  
Thaer A. Ghbari ◽  
Jalal K. Damra ◽  
Yahya H. Nassar

This study aimed at exploring the relationship between goal orientation (GO) and the feedback-seeing behavior (FSB). The sample consisted of 330 students from four sections which were chosen randomly from the university requirements of the Hashemite University.These courses were chosen purposively because they contain students from different faculties and majors. The students completed the GO and the FSB questionnaires. The results showed that the females adopted learning-approach goals, but the males adopted performance-approach goals. Concerning the FSB, students sought self-validation feedback. In respect to gender differences in FSB, males sought self-validation feedback, whereas females sought self-improvement feedback. The results also showed that there was a negative correlation between performance-approach goals and self-improvement feedback, but there was a positive correlation between performance-approach goals and self-improvement feedback. Learning-approach goals were positively correlated with self-improvement feedback, but correlated negatively with self-validation feedback. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Caroline Atieno Obura

The study examined the mediating role of learning strategies in the relationship between achievement goals and academic achievement. The study sample consisted of 597 students selected from 13 schools using purposive, stratified, proportionate and simple random sampling procedures. The study adopted a correlational research design to establish mediation of learning strategy in the relationships between achievement goals on academic achievement. Students’ achievement goals and learning strategy scales were adapted to measure achievement goals and learning strategies. Results of the study showed that there was a partial mediation of deep learning in the relationship between mastery goals and academic achievement. Partial mediation of surface learning strategy was equally reported, in the relationship between performance-approach goals and academic achievement.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Francis ◽  
Evelina Thunell

Dong, Huang, and Zhong (2015) report five successful experiments linking brightness perception with the feeling of hopelessness. They argue that a gloomy future is psychologically represented as darkness, not just metaphorically but as an actual perceptual bias. Based on multiple results, they conclude that people who feel hopeless perceive their environment as darker and therefore prefer brighter lighting than controls. Reversely, dim lighting caused participants to feel more hopeless. However, the experiments succeed at a rate much higher than predicted by the magnitude of the reported effects. Based on the reported statistics, the estimated probability of all five experiments being fully successful, if replicated with the same sample sizes, is less than 0.016. This low rate suggests that the original findings are (perhaps unintentionally) the result of questionable research practices or publication bias. Readers should therefore be skeptical about the original results and conclusions. Finally, we discuss how to design future studies to investigate the relationship between hopelessness and brightness.


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