Goal Patterns in Physical Education Running Programs: A Cluster Analysis

Purpose: Referred to how individuals define success in achievement situations (Nicholls, 1989), achievement goals influence students' motivation, behavior, and learning in schools. Task orientation and ego orientation are the two primary achievement goals identified in physical education. Task orientation defines success as developing one's competence through learning and task mastery, while ego orientation views success as demonstrating one's superiority over others. These two goals are theoretically independent. Most empirical research work supports this assumption and reveals a number of goal patterns and their differential roles in students' motivational outcomes (e.g.,. Xiang, McBride, Bruene, & Liu, 2007). But little is known whether the goal patterns are stable over the school years. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to use a cluster analysis as an analytical technique to examine goal patterns longitudinally. Method: Participants were 412 (215 boys, 197 girls) students from two intermediate schools, who participated in running programs conducted during regularly scheduled physical education classes for two years. They completed questionnaires assessing achievement goals and other motivational variables at the end of the fifth and sixth grade, respectively. All the questionnaire items were adapted from instruments with accepted reliability and validity. For this study only the data on students' task orientation and ego orientation were used. Analysis/Results: A two-stage cluster analysis was conducted for the fifth and sixth grade data separately. More specifically, at the Stage 1, the hierarchical cluster analysis with the Ward method of linkage identified the initial partitions of the data. At the Stage 2, K-means cluster analysis was used as a validation process to confirm the clusters derived from the Stage 1. Results indicated the two cluster analyses identified the same four goal patterns among students across the fifth and sixth grade. They were low task/low ego, low task/high ego, high task/low ego and high task/high ego. Conclusion: This study was the first longitudinal cluster-analytic study of goal patterns in physical education. The finding that the four goal patterns remained the same across the two grade levels suggests the four goal patterns were structurally stable among this group of students. Such a finding may provide a basis for researchers to further explore the four goal patterns in relation to student motivation, behavior, and learning in other physical education settings.