Merits and limitations of latent profile approaches to teachers’ achievement goals: A multi-study analysis

Martin Daumiller*, Stefan Janke, Ruth Butler, Oliver Dickhäuser, Markus Dresel

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Research on teacher goals has primarily followed a variable-centered approach, although person-centered approaches have inspired achievement goal research in other domains. The multiple goal perspective posits that individuals pursue different combinations of goals —goal profiles—that might be differentially adaptive or maladaptive. We investigate how beneficial goal profiles may be for research on teacher motivation, using data from three study sets (total N = 3,681) from different countries (Israel, Germany) and institution types (schools, universities). We analyzed whether psychologically meaningful, coherent, and generalizable goal profiles could be identified and compared the explanatory power of profiles and individual goals as predictors of teachers’ self-efficacy and work-related distress. Results showed six psychologically meaningful and largely generalizable goal profiles. Compared to individual goals, profiles only explained little differences in self-efficacy and work-related distress. Given these findings, we critically evaluate achievement goal profiles as a means to study effects of teacher goals.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere0284608
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume18
Issue number4 APRIL
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2023 Daumiller et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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