Merits and limitations of latent profile approaches to teachers’ achievement goals: A multi-study analysis

Research on teacher goals has primarily followed a variable-centered approach, although person-centered approaches have inspired achievement goal research in other domains. The multiple goal perspective posits that individuals pursue different combinations of goals—goal profiles—that might be differentially adaptive or maladaptive. We investigate how beneficial goal profiles may be for research on teacher motivation, using data from three study sets (total N = 3,681) from different countries (Israel, Germany) and institution types (schools, universities). We analyzed whether psychologically meaningful, coherent, and generalizable goal profiles could be identified and compared the explanatory power of profiles and individual goals as predictors of teachers’ self-efficacy and work-related distress. Results showed six psychologically meaningful and largely generalizable goal profiles. Compared to individual goals, profiles only explained little differences in self-efficacy and work-related distress. Given these findings, we critically evaluate achievement goal profiles as a means to study effects of teacher goals.