Examining the Relationships Between Students’ Achievement Goals and Their Academic Achievement in an OER-Based Course: A Person-Centered Approach

Open Educational Resources (OER) have emerged as a cost-effective alternative to traditional commercial textbooks in higher education, towards the goal of alleviating college students’ financial burden of educational expenses. However, mixed findings about the influences of the integration of OER on student learning are present. To address the gap, this study investigated whether student motivation in OER served as a latent factor that impacts their academic achievement in online asynchronous courses offered in public universities. Particularly, this study (N = 247) implemented an advanced person-centered approach—stepwise latent class analysis—to profile student achievement goals in an OER-based course and examined their relationships with academic achievement. The 7-point Likert responses were collapsed into three categories to address sparse response distributions. The analysis identified four latent classes based on students’ responses to a validated survey aligned with the 2 × 2 achievement goal theory framework, including highly ambitious, cautious, strategic, and low-goal learners. Subsequent analysis revealed that these four latent classes showed differences in academic achievement as well as task value and expectancy beliefs. The implications of these results for researchers and college instructors and future research directions are discussed.