Abstract

Goal orientation and interest are two motivational components of self-regulated learning that have been found to be positively correlated with the frequent use of learning strategies. The focus of this study was to examine if these two motivational components interact to affect students' use of learning strategies. Ninety-four grade 11 students participated in this study. This study was a 2 x 2 between-groups factorial using a post-test only control design. There were two independent variables: goal orientation and task interest. There were three dependent variables: student's total score on main-idea selection, additional cognitive strategies, and of metacognitive strategies. There were significant (p < .05) main effects for task interest and goal orientation on the main-idea selection measure. Students who reported having a high interest in the task were able to select more main ideas from the text than students with low interest in the text. Similarly, students who were offered a reward for finding the main ideas outperformed students who were encouraged to adopt an intrinsic goal orientation. There was also a main effect (p < .05) for interest on the metacognitive strategies measure. High interest students had higher metacognitive scores than low-interest students. These results suggest that interest is an important motivator for the selection of main ideas and in the use of metacognitive strategies. These results also suggest that when interest is low, offering a reward to students may help them to select the main ideas from text.