Bio

Mimi Bong is a Professor of Educational Psychology and a Graduate Program Chair in the Department of Education as well as the Director of bMRI (Brain and Motivation Research Institute; bmri.korea.ac.kr) and the BrainKorea 21 Project on Affect, Application, and AI-Solutions for Future Education at Korea University. Before joining Korea University, Bong taught at the University of South Carolina and Ewha Womans University. She received her MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, and her PhD from the University of Southern California.

Bong's scholarship focuses on student motivation and learning within classroom settings. Her early work contributed to establishing the conceptual and empirical distinctiveness of self-concept and self-efficacy and highlighting the domain-specificity of various motivation constructs including self-efficacy, achievement goal orientations, and value perceptions. Bong was recognized as one of the most productive educational psychologists from 1997 through 2001 and received the 2006 Richard E. Snow Award for Early Contributions in Educational Psychology from the American Psychological Association. She was also noted as one of the top-producing female educational psychologists from 2009 through 2016.

Bong was drawn to the field of motivation by her observation of Korean students studying for misguided reasons and grappling with unwarranted lack of confidence and anxiety. Although her early research largely delved into conceptual issues, her ultimate goal has consistently been to assist real students in real classrooms. From 2017 and onwards, Bong has thus started implementing motivation interventions for elementary school children, targeting the mindset of both young children and their parents and enhancing children's confidence and appreciation for learning.

Bong has published over 94 articles in peer-reviewed international and domestic journals and 21 book chapters. She also co-edited "Motivation Science: Controversies and Insights," published by Oxford University Press, with Johnmarshall Reeve and Sung-il Kim. She served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Experimental Education (2022-2024) and the Associate Editor of the American Educational Research Journal (2014-2015). She is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and the American Psychological Association's Division 15. Bong is the President of the Korean Educational Psychology Association.

Abstract

Reconsidering Achievement Goals from the Perspective of the Self: Part II

Mimi Bong and Sungwha Kim

Department of Education and the Brain & Motivation Research Institute (bMRI), Korea University

The definition of achievement goals has undergone several transformations since the construct made its debut. The original conceptualization emphasized the interpretive role of what was then called 'goal orientations' by defining them as a cognitive framework used to construe and respond to achievement-relevant information. This definition was criticized for intermixing the reasons and aims of achievement behaviors. The failure of mastery orientations to consistently predict better performance, along with the perplexing effects of performance-approach orientations to predict both higher anxiety and better performance, were attributed to this definitional ambiguity. A more recent re-conceptualization thus stressed the importance of distinguishing the aim from its underlying reasons and redefined achievement goals solely as the aim of competence-oriented behaviors. Unfortunately, this revised theorizing has not been successful in eliminating the controversies and instead invited new questions regarding the motivational properties of these competence-driven aims. Some researchers have proposed 'goal complexes,' which essentially merge the reasons and the aims back together. However, it is unclear where this effort is heading and whether it can resolve existing problems or revive research on achievement goals. We argue that this lamentable state of affairs is due to the neglect of self-motives and propose a way to incorporate self-processes for a better understanding of achievement goal effects.