Abstract
This study investigated how goal orientation in first-year junior high students in an English language course changed before and after regular school examinations as well as how their learning strategies changed along with goal orientation. In addition, it examined students' academic performance and how it corresponded to these changes. The study analyzed students' responses to a questionnaire and found that students whose goal orientation was self-regulated adopted deep-processing learning strategies that facilitated understanding and thus performed well on exams. Students whose goal orientations were consistently inappropriate for their goals did not perform not well on exams. Students who had the low goal orientation adopted an ineffective and self-handicapping strategy and thus performed poorly on exams. Furthermore, the relationship between changes in goal orientation and changes in learning strategies showed a pattern not predicted by previous studies: The exact combination of the three types of goal orientation determined students' performance, and even students with similar results could have different goal orientations or learning strategies.
