Mentoring and the impact of the research climate.

In this article, we focus on the mentoring process, and we argue that the internal and external pressures extant at research universities may create a research culture that may be antithetical to appropriate mentoring. We developed a scale based on motivation theory to determine the perceived research culture in departments and research laboratories, and a mentoring scale to determine approaches to mentoring graduate students. Participants were 610 faculty members across 49 departments at a research oriented university. The findings were that a mastery-oriented research climate and an outcome-oriented research climate were manifested at the university. More importantly, each research climate had its own unique impact on how the faculty approached mentoring graduate students. A mastery research climate was related to a more supportive approach to mentoring than the outcome research climate. We concluded by suggesting that the outcome research climate may have an adverse effect on effective mentoring and on maintaining research ethics.

Self-esteem in children: do goal orientations matter?

BACKGROUND: Although perceived competence has been identified as an essential component of global self-esteem, individual differences in the way competence is conceptualised have been virtually ignored. Achievement goal theory suggests that two conceptions of competence operate in achievement contexts: competence can be conceived as capacity or improvement. These two conceptions are embedded within two goal orientations, namely task and ego orientation. AIMS: The study examined the relationship of goal orientations and perceptions of athletic ability to global self-esteem. SAMPLES: Children (N = 907) attending summer sports camps participated in the study. METHOD: Children completed the Perception of Success Questionnaire and the Self-Esteem Scale and recorded their perceptions of normative athletic ability. RESULTS: High task-oriented children reported significantly higher self-esteem than low task-oriented children. Among high task-oriented boys, those with high perceived ability had higher self-esteem. In addition, high ego-oriented boys had high self-esteem when they perceived themselves as having high ability in relation to their peers. Finally, among low task-oriented girls, those with high perceived ability reported higher self-esteem. CONCLUSIONS: The findings are consistent with the tenets of achievement goal theory that success and failure are subjective psychological states. It is recommended that different conceptions of competence are considered in the study of self-esteem.

Perceived motivational climate and cognitive and affective correlates among Norwegian athletes.

Based on Ames' conception of situational goal structures, the present study investigated whether achievement-related cognitions and affect were related to specific motivational climates. The participants were 148 experienced students in team sport at a Norwegian university who responded to a questionnaire on their perceptions of the motivational climate in their sport, use of learning strategies, satisfaction, sources of satisfaction and perceived purposes of participating in sport. Canonical correlation analysis revealed that the perception of the motivational climate as either mastery- or performance-involving was related to reporting of affect, achievement strategies and perceived purposes of sport in a conceptually consistent manner. Controlling for dispositional goals, regression analyses, in which the athletes' dispositional achievement goals were controlled, showed that perception of a performance-oriented climate emerged as a negative and unique predictor of satisfaction or interest in addition to the variance accounted for by ego orientation. Athletes who perceived the motivational climate as mastery-oriented endorsed mastery as a source of satisfaction, and were less inclined to report avoiding practice. In addition, athletes who perceived the climate as mastery-oriented believed that sport may develop lifetime skills. In contrast, perceiving the climate as performance-oriented was positively related to status as a perceived purpose of team sport. Our findings suggest that, when athletes perceive the sport climate as task-involving, it facilitates the adoption of adaptive learning strategies, the use of controllable criteria to determine satisfaction, and enhances perception of sport as being important for developing lifetime skills.