Effect of Goal Orientation on EFL Learners’ Performances in CBT and PBT Across Gender

One of the motivational factors that is presumed to be an important predictor of students’ learning processing is goal achievement orientation. Goal orientation is simply defined as a factor that reflects the reasons and the purposes of students to engage in achievement tasks. This study aimed to comprehensively investigate the impact of goal orientation on students’ performances in computer based test (CBT) and paper-based tests (PBT), across gender. For this purpose, an achievement test was administered to 80 EFL learners (40 male and 40 female), half of which took the PBT and the rest the CBT format. The results demonstrate that goal orientation does not significantly affect students’ performances in either test format. However, it was found that females outperformed males in both types of tests. These results can have implications which are described in details in the paper.