Where there's a will, there's a way : the mediating effect of academic aspiration between beliefs and academic outcomes

The present study tested a mediation model to predict adolescents’ academic achievement in Hong Kong. Generalized expectancies, including personal beliefs about agency and competence (i.e., self-efficacy) and social beliefs about effort and outcome (i.e., reward for application and fate control), were found to be significant antecedents of academic aspiration, a domain-specific mediator that predicted academic achievement positively. Self-efficacy and reward for application were positively related to academic aspiration. The indirect effect of fate control was negative on academic aspiration, but its direct effect was positive on academic achievement. These findings were used to make sense of the equivocal patterns of general self-efficacy, social axioms, and academic outcomes in the extant literature on learning and achievement.