The Relationships among High School Students’Achievement Goal Orientation, Mistake Recognition, and Creative Performance in Physical Education Classes

This study investigated the structural relationships among achievement goal orientation, mistake recognition, and creative performance in physical education (PE) classes, addressing the gap in prior work that often treated mistake-related beliefs as a single construct. Achievement goal orientation showed significant positive effects on all four sub-dimensions of mistake recognition (mistake learning, mistake challenge, mistake burden, and mistake reflection) and on creative performance. Among mistake-recognition factors, mistake challenge and mistake reflection positively predicted creative performance, mistake burden negatively predicted it, and mistake learning was not significant. These findings indicate that recognizing mistakes as opportunities for challenge and reflection fosters creativity, whereas viewing them as burdens hinders it. Achievement goal orientation thus functions not only as a determinant of academic achievement but also as a psychological factor shaping creative outcomes. Instructional practices that explicitly frame mistakes as resources—while reducing perceived burdens—may enhance students’ creative performance, though interpretations should consider the single-region convenience sample and cross-sectional design.