How do students’ achievement goals relate to learning from well-designed instructional videos and subsequent exam performance?

Well-designed instructional videos are powerful tools for helping students learn and prompting students to use generative strategies while learning from videos further bolsters their effectiveness. However, little is known about how individual differences in motivational factors, such as achievement goals, relate to how students learn within multimedia environments that include instructional videos and generative strategies. Therefore, in this study, we explored how achievement goals predicted undergraduate students’ behaviors when learning with instructional videos that required students to answer practice questions between videos, as well as how those activities predicted subsequent unit exam performance one week later. Additionally, we tested the best measurement models for modeling achievement goals between traditional confirmatory factor analysis and bifactor confirmatory factor analysis. The bifactor model fit our data best and was used for all subsequent analyses. Results indicated that stronger mastery goal endorsement predicted performance on the practice questions in the multimedia learning environment, which in turn positively predicted unit exam performance. In addition, students’ time spent watching videos positively predicted practice question performance. Taken together, this research emphasizes the availing role of adaptive motivations, like mastery goals, in learning from instructional videos that prompt the use of generative learning strategies.