The causal model of predicting virtual education student's academic achievement: the role of intelligence beliefs, achievement goals and academic emotions

The present study aimed at predicting academic achievement based on intelligence beliefs, achievement goals, and academic emotions in a causal model framework through path analysis.

To do so, 231 postgraduate students from Fars Payame Noor University were selected through simple random sampling, and were asked to answer a self-report questionnaire consisting of intelligence beliefs (Dupeyrat & Marine, 2005), achievement goals (Middleton & Midgley, 1997), and academic emotions (Pekrun et al, 2005) subscales. Meanwhile, the student's final grade point average was considered as an indicator of academic achievement.

Overall, the results indicated the indirect and different effects of entity and incremental intelligence beliefs on academic achievement.

The results showed that incremental intelligence beliefs have indirect and positive effect on academic achievement through the mediation of mastery goals and positive emotions. Furthermore, the entity intelligence beliefs have indirect and negative effect on academic achievement through the mediation of performance-avoidance goals, performance-approach goals and negative emotions. Moreover, the direct effect of entity intelligence beliefs on negative emotions was significant; however, the direct effect of incremental intelligence beliefs on positive emotions was not confirmed.