What do Chinese students say about their academic motivational goals—reasons underlying academic strivings?

Abstract

Although differences in academic motivation may exist across cultures, research on academic motivational goals has been Western-focused and relied on Western originated questionnaire. There is a dearth of studies adopting bottom-up, emic, and in-depth approaches to explore East Asian students’ academic motivation. This study describes Chinese students’ academic motivational goals in their own words. Participants were 28 11th-grade students (Mage = 16.1 years, age range: 15–17 years, including 15 males) from urban, rural, and suburban regions. They were interviewed in individual sessions and asked open-ended questions, such as “Why do you engage in academic tasks?” Inductive content analyses suggested that these students wanted to do well academically or engage in academic tasks for a wide variety of reasons. Among these, the most salient were: (1) to obtain college admission and elevate social status; (2) performance-oriented reasons; (3) to master the knowledge and develop competence; (4) family-oriented reasons; and, (5) personal interest. Furthermore, their responses suggested many students viewed education as a means to an end. They sought to (1) master knowledge and gain good results on college admission examination for upward social mobility; and, (2) to achieve high performance and outperform others for family-oriented reasons.