Academic success represents one of the best indicators of psychological adjustment in adolescence (Verboom, Sijtsema, Verhulst, Penninx, & Ormel, 2014; Zuffianò et al., 2013). With the aim of understanding predictors of academic achievement, previous researchers analyzed the impact of students' individual characteristics in explaining their academic success at school. High levels of academic performance are, indeed, positively related to adolescents’ self esteem (Marsh, Trautwein, Ludtke, Koller, & Baumert, 2006), self efficacy beliefs (Pajares & Urdan, 2005), and socially appropriate behaviors (Caprara et al., 2014).

Noteworthy, students’ achievement goals, defined as the reason for which students orient themselves to achieving academic success, may also contribute to explain adolescents’ academic performance (Vassiou, Mouratidis, Andreou, & Kafetsios, 2014). In this regard, Elliot and Church (1997) suggested a trichotomous achievement goal model. A Mastery-approach goal corresponds to achievement goals focused on improvement and learning, and in general to students’ desire to understand  and to develop new skills. A Performance-approach goal consists in the desire to perform better than peers and to look competent. Finally, a Performance-avoidance goal reflects an approach aimed at avoiding to perform worse than classmates, and, thus, to demonstrate incompetence. With regard to the associations between academic goals and academic performance, researchers demonstrated a positive relation between the mastery-approach goal and the students’ academic performance and a negative association between students’ performance avoidance goal and their academic performance (Patrick & Ryan, 2008). Consistent findings were not found in the relation between performance-approach goals and academic performance (Vassiou et al., 2014).

Therefore, we need to provide valid and reliable measures to assess students’ achievement goals because the students’ academic performance is interrelated to academic goals,. The Patterns of Adaptive Learning scale (PALS; Midgley et al., 2000) represents a valid questionnaire widely used in the international context to assess students’ academic achievement. The PALS is composed of three related scales: mastery-approach goals, performance-approach goals and performance-avoid goals. As the PALS is one of the most used instruments to assess students’ academic achievement goals, it is important to analyze the validity of the scale across countries. The present study aims to evaluate the factor validity of the PALS of Italian sixth grade  students and has three main goals. First, we are interested in examining the factor structure of the PALS, giving particular attention to mathematics discipline. We considered mathematics discipline for its focus on the development of the skills (Middleton, Kaplan, & Midgley, 2004). Secondly, we tested the measurement invariance of the scale across gender to examine wether the PALS measures the same constructs in both females and males. Finally, we analyzed the relations between PALS with students’ mathematics performance. We expected to find a positive association between mastery-approach goals and students' scores in mathematics and a negative relation between students' scores in Math and performance-avoidance goals. Therefore, the use of the PALS may be particularly important in the Italian educational context, especially at the beginning of middle school where students interact with the same teacher and classmates for three years. The administration of a reliable questionnaire on students’ academic goals in Maths domain may help teachers to promote students’ academic performance in Maths over years.

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