Achievement or agreement - Which comes first? Clarifying the temporal ordering of achievement and within-class consensus on classroom goal structures

Within-class consensus describes the extent to which students agree in their perceptions of classroom characteristics. The most frequently studied external link in research on within-class consensus is achievement. However, the direction of effects between consensus and achievement is disputed, and longitudinal studies that could add clarity are largely lacking. This study therefore investigated the temporal ordering of achievement and consensus. Consensus was assessed within the framework of classroom goal structures, and thus, for the three dimensions of task, autonomy, and recognition/evaluation. A total of 490 secondary school students (49.6% female, 31 classes) participated in the study. Results from multilevel cross-lagged panel models revealed no effect in either direction for task, but showed that higher class-average achievement at the first measurement wave positively predicted consensus on autonomy and recognition/evaluation at the second wave. The findings for autonomy and recognition/evaluation highlight the impact of achievement on consensus and raise opportunities for future research.