2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This theory paper provides an evidence-based critique of a prominent motivational theory, achievement goal theory (AGT). Achievement goals were intended to capture the reason students engaged in academic tasks. Three-goal motives were theorized to explain why students engaged in achievement-related tasks: 1) pursuing mastery, 2) demonstrating one’s ability relative to others, or 3) avoiding appearing academically inadequate. However, AGT was developed without considering the influence of students’ culture or unique lived experiences. Studies that developed the foundations of AGT centered on White experiences, and it was considered acceptable to center the point of view of White students to develop theory for all students. Motivational processes and decisions were considered culture-free and universal.
AGT assumes the goal motives apply to all students, irrespective of their cultural backgrounds, yet minoritized students enroll in engineering programs with unique lived experiences that differentially shape their motivation. Therefore, to understand the utility of the achievement goals, I evaluated their relationship with important affective measures such as self-efficacy and persistence beliefs. Specifically, I sought to answer the following research question:
Given that AGT was developed through the perspective of White scholars and primarily validated through White students, how effectively does AGT explain Latinx engineering students’ course self-efficacy and persistence beliefs?

I used cross-sectional survey data from one Hispanic-Serving Institution. of Latina, Latino, and White students. Multiple regression analysis was used to understand how effectively the different goal types explained students’ self-efficacy and persistence beliefs. Separate regression models were run for each student group. The adjusted R-square provided insight into the explanatory power of each model, and the standardized coefficients provided estimates of the relative contribution of each goal orientation.
The achievement goal measures explained 56% of the variance in course self-efficacy beliefs and 66% of the variance in persistence beliefs for White students but had less than 25% explanatory power for Latinx students. This explanatory power indicates that the achievement goal measures are well-aligned with the motivational processes and educational experiences of White students, making them more reliable predictors for this demographic. Mastery goals, specifically, had a greater impact on White students’ course self-efficacy and persistence beliefs compared to Latinx students.
These findings reflect the disparities between achievement goal theory’s ability to understand the motivational process of minoritized students accurately. The lack of explanatory power across different racialized students signals that the achievement goal orientations do not adequately capture the motivational drivers of diverse students. My results confirm AGT’s validity for White students, but they simultaneously obscure the ways in which the theory fails to account for the different cultural assets and structural barriers faced by Latinx students. Other factors (e.g., cultural, social, or structural inequalities) or perhaps goal orientations not yet theorized might play a more significant role in shaping minoritized students’ self-efficacy and persistence beliefs.
In the paper, I use principles of Quantitative Critical Race theory (QuantCrit) to interpret the results. This theory paper calls attention to the importance of (re)conceptualizing motivational theories, like AGT, through minoritized students’ cultural context.