Background/Purpose Contemporary achievement motivation theorists and researchers argue that an emphasis on task orientation fosters feelings of competence and greater effort (Williams and Gill, 1995). The aim of this study was to examine the relationships among task goal orientations and effort of middle-school students in learning swimming according to ARC Learn-To-Swim program.
Method Participants were 82 middle-school students (48 boys, 34 girls; M age= 12.7 years) enrolled in an urban public school in NYC. The background questionnaire asked the students to respond to items such as gender, age, grade, water skills level (1-6) and whether they compete on a swimming team. The Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire (TEOSQ; Duda, 1992) assessed students' goal orientations. A self-report questionnaire modified after Williams and Gill (1995) was used to assess students' perceptions of their effort when engaged in learning swimming.
Analysis/Results A simple regression analysis was used to investigate the relationship between task goal orientation and effort in learning swimming. As boys and girls were found to differ in perception of effort, but not their goal orientations, it was also examined how gender impacts this relationship. Results indicated that approximately 19% of the variance in effort, R = .41, F(1, 81) = 37.72, p < .01, was accounted for by task goal orientation. Exploratory analyses revealed that for boys approximately 8% of the variance in effort, R = .25, F(1, 46) = 5.24, p < .05, was associated with task orientation, whereas approximately 26% of the variance, R = .51, F(1, 32) = 38.32, p < .05, was explained for girls.
Conclusions These results show that task orientation explains a statistically significant amount of variance in effort to learn swimming for both boys and girls. However, more variance is explained for girls than for boys. Therefore, task goal orientation is a stronger predictor of effort in learning swimming for girls than boys.