The Reliability and Validity of the Goal Orientaion and Learning Strategies Survey (GOALS-S): A Filipino Invesigaion Ronnel B. King,* David A. Watkins The University of Hong Kong *ronnel.king@gmail.com The Goal Orientation and Learning Strategies Survey (GOALS-S; Dowson & McInerney, 2004) is an instrument designed to assess four sets of constructs: (1) academic goals, (2) social goals, (3) cognitive strategies, and (4) metacognitive strategies of high school students. This instrument was initially developed and validated among students in Australia. The applicability of this instrument to the Philippine setting was tested in a study involving 1,147 Filipino students from Metro Manila. Responses to this questionnaire are shown to have good internal consistency reliability. Support is provided for its within-network construct validity in terms of its factorial structure and evidence of its between-network construct validity is shown through its correlations with other valued educational outcomes. Different multigroup conirmatory factor analysis likewise indicated that the instrument is invariant across genders, across year levels, and across type of school. Suggestions for further research using the GOALS-S are provided. Keywords: GOALS-S, validation, conirmatory factor analyses, Filipino students The Asia-Paciic Education Researcher 20:3 (2011), pp. 579-594 Copyright © 2011 De La Salle University, Philippines Students’ academic goals (Covington, 2000; Elliot, 2005; Kaplan & Maehr, 2007; Maehr & Zusho, 2009), social goals (Urdan & Maehr, 1995; Wentzel, 2000), cognitive strategies (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; Lau, Liem, & Nie, 2008; Marton, Dall’Alba, & Kun, 1996; Pressly & Harris, 2006), and metacognitive strategies (Hacker, 1998; Schunk, 2001; Wright & Jacobs, 2003) have all been implicated as crucial for successful learning in school. Thus the accurate measurement of these constructs is important for both educational researchers and practitioners. However, there has been a dearth of instruments that measured all these constructs in one scale. Most of the existing scales only measured one or two of these constructs together (e.g., Elliot & McGregor, 2001; Midgley et al., 2000; Pintrich & DeGroot, 1990). As such, most educational researchers are forced to use different instruments to assess constructs relevant to their research. The use of different instruments, however, may cause some problems because the psychometric properties of these instruments might not be fully known before data collection. Thus Dowson and McInerney (2004) developed the Goal Orientation and Learning Strategies Survey (GOALS-S) to remedy this absence of a coherent set of measures that assesses all these sets of constructs in a single instrument. GOALS-S is an 84-item self-report questionnaire that assesses four sets of constructs that are further divided into different subscales: (1) academic goals (mastery goals, performance goals, and work avoidance goals), (2) social goals (social afiliation goals, social approval goals, social concern goals, social responsibility goals, and social status goals), (3) cognitive strategies (elaboration, organization, and rehearsal), and (4) metacognitive strategies (monitoring, planning, and regulating). An advantage of GOALS-S is that it measures a multiplicity of students’ goals. It incorporates three kinds of academic goals (mastery, performance, and work avoidance) and ive kinds of social goals (social