Asian students often show superior academic achievement through hard work, but are also less satisfied with their results and known to be more anxious than their Western counterparts. How can these achievement patterns, which from a Western perspective seem so contradictory, be explained? The research investigated the accountability of the social-oriented achievement motivation (SOAM) model on Chinese students' academic-related patterns beyond the traditional individual-oriented achievement motivation model (IOAM). Consistent findings across five studies demonstrated that Chinese students' achievement patterns are better understood and explained systematically with the social-oriented approach, using samples ranging from junior high school to high school and college students. Study 1 re...[ Read more ]

Asian students often show superior academic achievement through hard work, but are also less satisfied with their results and known to be more anxious than their Western counterparts. How can these achievement patterns, which from a Western perspective seem so contradictory, be explained? The research investigated the accountability of the social-oriented achievement motivation (SOAM) model on Chinese students' academic-related patterns beyond the traditional individual-oriented achievement motivation model (IOAM). Consistent findings across five studies demonstrated that Chinese students' achievement patterns are better understood and explained systematically with the social-oriented approach, using samples ranging from junior high school to high school and college students. Study 1 revealed that SOAM endorsement was a positive predictor of cognitive beliefs in academic achievement as a social and moral obligation. Study 2 further demonstrated a positive relationship between students' beliefs about academic achievement as a moral obligation and their concomitant guilt feelings in the academic setting. In Study 3, SOAM endorsement acted as a positive predictor of the adoption of performance demonstration and avoidance goals, and experiences of agitation emotions such as guilt, shame, and anxiety after receiving failure feedback on a novel task in an experiment setting. Studies 4 and 5 demonstrated that students' SOAM endorsement predicted their collective agency due to parental influence, their adoption of performance demonstration and avoidance goals at the cognitive level, their experience of agitation emotions and their level of test anxiety at the affective level, their adoption of achieving and surface approaches to learning, their effort and time invested in studying, and better actual examination performance at the behavioral level. This research shed light on using the SOAM approach to better understand and explain Chinese students' achievement patterns, which cannot be adequately understood using the traditional individualistic approach. The author highlights the necessity of integrating a socially-oriented perspective into the traditional individualist perspective when studying Chinese achievement-related issues.