Meanwhile, Nicholls was developing a related theory that goal motivation would lead grade school children to set high task-related goals. Nicholls later conceptualized these differences as two types of achievement goals: task involvement, where individuals seek to develop their competence relative to their abilities, and ego involvement , where individuals seek to develop their competence relative to the abilities of others.

There are multiple conceptualizations and operationalizations of goal orientation. Dweck's initial research suggested two component of goal orientation, learning orientation or performance orientation which was assessed in children based on task preference. Later research by Elliot and VandeWalle suggested a three factor model.

Vandewalle's research suggested three factors learning, avoiding poor performance, and demonstrating good performance. Concurrently, Elliot developed a model of goal orientation in terms of avoiding poor outcomes vs achieving good outcomes and mastery vs performance which improved measures of intrinsic motivation and suggested a three factor model: mastery achievement, performance-approach and performance-avoid.

Dweck proposed that there are two types of goal orientation: mastery orientation and performance orientation. Like Eison, Dweck conceptualized goal orientation as a two-dimension construct. Individuals with a mastery orientation seek to develop their competence by acquiring new skills and mastering new situations.

Although Dweck's work in this area built on the foundation laid by Nicholls, the fundamental difference between the two scholars' works is the attribution of an individual's goal orientation: Nicholls believed that the goal orientation held by an individual was a result of the possession of either an internal or external referent [ definition needed ] , while Dweck considered the adoption of a particular goal orientation to be related to the theory of intelligence held by that individual.

Subsequent work by Eison and colleagues in led to a change in the conceptualization of these orientations from two ends of a continuum to two separate constructs. Ultimately, they can entertain multiple competing goal orientations at the same time, and strive to both outperform competitors and improve their performance.

This line of thinking led to the conceptualization of two separate continua: one for mastery orientation and one for performance orientation. Significant research and a consistent pattern of results have demonstrated that an individual's goal orientation in a particular domain can be characterized by one of two distinct profiles: mastery orientation or performance orientation.

Researchers have conducted validation studies to demonstrate the statistical and conceptual distinction of further dimensions to goal orientation. In , Elliot broke down the traditional mastery and performance orientations to include approach and avoidance components, [24] [25] resulting in four distinct profiles: mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance.

Similarly, a prove performance orientation focuses on demonstrating performance to prove competence [1]. A mastery orientation is characterized by the belief that success is the result of effort and use of the appropriate strategies.

Mastery oriented individuals strive to develop their understanding and competence at a task by exerting a high level of effort.

Across numerous studies, mastery orientation has been shown to promote adaptive patterns of learning, which ultimately lead to high academic achievement and adjustment. VandeWalle defines mastery orientation as the "desire to develop the self by acquiring new skills, mastering new situations, and improving one's competence".

These individuals focus on improving skills and acquiring knowledge, and are less concerned with making mistakes. Research shows that the adoption of mastery goals leads to greater intrinsic motivation as opposed to performance approach or performance avoidance, which are associated with external motivation.

One possible implication for educators is the need to emphasize knowledge-centred classroom environments that encourage "doing with understanding". According to Elliot, mastery-approach goals "entail striving to develop one's skills and abilities, advance one's learning, understand the material, or complete or master a task".

Alternatively, mastery-avoidance goals "entail striving to avoid losing one's skills and abilities or having their development stagnate , forgetting what one has learned, misunderstanding material, or leaving a task incomplete or unmastered". For example, an elderly individual may notice that their physical and mental capacity is declining, and as a result, may focus their goals on sustaining or improving these diminishing capacities.

The separation of mastery orientation into two categories is neither widely accepted nor substantially proven. A performance orientation is characterized by the belief that success is the result of superior ability and of surpassing one's peers. In , VandeWalle proposed that goal orientation is better conceptualized as a three-factor model, [1] dividing performance orientation into the dimensions of prove performance orientation and avoidant performance orientation.

VandeWalle defines prove performance as the "desire to prove one's competence and to gain favorable judgments about it". People with performance approach orientation seek positive reinforcement and feedback. VandeWalle defines avoid performance as the "desire to avoid the disproving of one's competence and to avoid negative judgments about it".

People with avoid performance orientation focus on avoiding situations in which they will receive evaluations or risk demonstrating a lack of confidence. Individuals high in fear of failure are more likely to adopt avoid performance goals. There has been debate as to whether goal orientation should be operationalized as a state or as a trait.

Throughout the goal orientation literature, there are inconsistencies about the conceptualization of the stability of the construct. However, state goal orientation is "specific to the task and context at hand". Trait goal orientation refers to the "consistent pattern of responses in achievement situations based on the individual's standing on goal orientation dimensions".

They found that when few situational cues are present, individuals adopt their dispositional goal orientations. However, when "dispositional goal orientations predispose individuals to adopt particular response patterns across situations, situational characteristics may cause them to adopt a different or less acute response pattern for a specific situation".

Researchers in personality have settled on the Big Five model as the best conceptualization of personality which defines personality in terms of five measures: [45] openness to experience, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.

Personality factors combine to create people's various orientations toward learning and goals, which in turn predict the types of tasks they will engage in. In a meta-analysis by Payne et al. Learning orientation was found to be positively correlated with all five measures of personality with openness to experience and conscientiousness having the largest correlations.

Proving good performance was uncorrelated with all aspect of personality, apart from a negative correlation with neuroticism. Many studies have examined relationships between goal orientation and various antecedents factors which predict the presence of goal orientation.

These antecedents have been identified to have varying levels of importance. Age is a significant factor in predicting an individual's goal orientation, with younger individuals more likely to adopt a mastery orientation.

Supporting the gender disparities in STEM fields, previous research has suggested that females develop a motivational orientation that is maladaptive to high academic achievement, particularly in math and science. Research by Dweck has shown gender differences with females being more extrinsic or performance oriented.

On the other hand, other studies have found that females are more likely to be mastery oriented, while males are more likely to hold performance orientations. Despite the lack of uniformity among research findings, there is a general consensus that gender influences the development of different rationales and motivations for behavior, as a result of unique socialization expectations and experiences.

Social influences, particularly parents and peers, affect the goal orientation of students. During early and middle childhood, the goal beliefs, attitudes and expectations of a child's parents carries significant weight in determining his or her goal orientation.

Peers influence goal orientation because children adopt academic goals and beliefs consistent with the dominant social norms.

Adolescents with friends having high academic aspirations tend to have fewer problems academically. Research has produced mixed results when examining the relationship between cognitive ability - such as intelligence - and goal orientation.

For example, Eison found that mastery-oriented students had higher levels of cognitive ability than grade-oriented performance-oriented students. Accordingly, individuals with high cognitive ability are equally likely to hold learning, prove performance, and avoid performance orientations.

These authors also found that mastery orientation predicted job performance above and beyond cognitive ability. Epistemological beliefs of intelligence and cognitive ability refer to an individual's belief about the nature of intellectual ability.

Specifically, it is whether they believe that intelligence is a fixed characteristic, or a malleable quality. Individuals conceptions of intelligence have been shown to influence cognitive and motivational factors associated with goal orientation and ultimately academic performance.

If an individual has an entity also referred to as "fixed" view of intelligence, they believe that intelligence is an unchanging characteristic and are more likely to think effort plays little to no role in outcome. In other words, you are either smart, or you are not.

This is particularly maladaptive in academia. Students believe that effort is unnecessary because if you are smart, everything should come easy, and if you are not smart, hard work cannot compensate for this deficiency.

Students with an entity view of intelligence are more likely to develop a fear of failure, [57] [58] resulting in the avoidance of "intellectual tasks," [33] and giving up in the face of difficulty.

The rationale is that if you are smart, effort is unnecessary, and if you are not, there is nothing you can do to change this.

In opposition to entity theory, individuals with an incremental also referred to as "flexible," and "malleable" view of intelligence believe that intelligence is adjustable. The belief is that intelligence is the result of hard work and the use of the appropriate strategies.

This is particularly adaptive because rather than giving up in the face of failure or challenge, those who endorse an incremental view of intelligence interpret these setbacks as inevitable for learning to take place.

Because they are not worried that exertion of effort is a reflection of lack of intelligence, they are not afraid to work hard, resulting in an outperformance of their entity theory peers.

Even after several years, the effect is consistent, such that students with an incremental view of intelligence academically outperform students who had an entity view of intelligence. The need for achievement refers to the degree to which an individual "maintains high standards" and "aspires to accomplish difficult tasks".

They also found that the need for achievement correlated more strongly with achievement orientation than conscientiousness. Although achievement orientation and the need for achievement were found to be strongly related, the findings demonstrate that achievement orientation is related to, but not synonymous with the need for achievement.

Mindset refers to an individual's belief about oneself and one's most basic qualities, such as talent, intelligence, and personality. Although the majority of research on mindsets has focused primarily on how they affect educational achievement, [61] [62] mindsets have also been shown to be influential in athletics, health and well-being, business and relationships.

Fixed mindsets are characterized by the belief that one's basic qualities are fixed — as if genetically predetermined. Individuals with fixed mindsets believe that practice has no relationship to performance success, which has been shown to be maladaptive across domains.

Growth mindsets are characterized by the belief that talents and abilities are things that are developed through effort, practice and instruction. Individuals with growth mindsets feel that they control their success, rather than external forces, so they are better able to problem solve and persist through setbacks.

Research has shown that growth mindsets foster a more positive attitude toward practice and learning, a desire for feedback, a greater ability to deal with setbacks, and significantly better performance over time. In , Dweck explained that when students view intelligence as something that develops over time they view challenging work as an opportunity to learn and grow.

These students value effort and realize that "even geniuses have to work hard to develop their abilities and make their contributions". In order to foster a growth mindset, teachers need to encourage students to welcome challenges and view it as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Designing and presenting learning tasks that foster a growth mindset in students, leads to long-term success. Teachers that illustrate meaningful work help students gain the tools they need to find confidence in their learning and be successful in future challenges.

One factor that has been shown to be influential in the development of goal orientations is the type of praise given to individuals. Specifically, it affects how individuals deal with future difficulties and their willingness to apply effort to challenges that may come their way.

The specific distinction lies in what the praise is directed towards. Process praise is focused on the actions taken by the individual, especially their effort and problem solving strategies, such as "Great job!

You're working really hard. Person praise is focused on the individual themselves, similar to an affirmation of self-worth, such as, "Wow, you're so smart. Students are being rewarded, through praise, for their performance based on their ability.

Children who are given person praise tend to have worse task performance, more low-ability attributions, report less task enjoyment and exhibit less task persistence, than children who are given process praise. Although praise for intelligence is usually well-intentioned, and can be motivating when students are doing well, it backfires when students eventually face work that is difficult for them.

When this happens, the failure is a threat to the person's sense of his or her own intelligence—a situation to avoid. Thus, praise for intelligence is a short-term strategy that makes successful students feel good at the moment, but one that is detrimental to students in the longer run.

Historically, goal-setting theory has primarily been concerned with performance goals. Locke and Latham summarize 25 years of goal setting research by stating that as long as an individual is committed to a goal and has the ability to achieve it, specific, hard goals lead to a higher level of task performance than vague or easy goals.

Studies in laboratory settings gave subjects fairly simple tasks. It is possible that when tasks are more complex or require a long-term commitment, adopting a goal may lead to higher performance.

Fan et al. found that the relationship between trait mastery orientation and goal-setting was moderated by self-efficacy such that individuals high in mastery orientation and self-efficacy set higher goals that those high in mastery orientation but low in self-efficacy, [68] which suggests that, while mastery orientation can influence goal setting, the relationship also depends on other factors such as the individual's level of self-efficacy.

They also found that learning and prove goal orientations facilitated striving for challenges, suggesting that either orientation can effectively facilitate motivation for goal attainment. Another factor to consider when examining the relationship between goal orientation and goal setting is the level of inherent complexity in the situation or task.

In situations with more complex tasks, "do your best" goals may lead to higher performance than specific goals. It is possible that in complex tasks, a specific, difficult goal imposes greater cognitive demands on employees, making it difficult for them to learn the complex task due to this increased pressure.

However, it may be possible to set a specific, difficult learning goal. Latham and Brown found that when MBA students set specific, difficult learning goals such as mastering complex course material, [71] they outperformed MBA students who set a performance goal for their grades.

Locke and Latham claim that creating a specific, difficult learning goal in this type of situation facilitates meta-cognition which is particularly helpful in complex environments with limited guidance, such as in an MBA program.

The goal orientation literature has examined the relationships among goal orientation and various proximal e. academic and organizational performance.

They also found that avoidant performance orientation was the only dimension negatively related to the various outcomes. Payne et al. found that the learning strategies including metacognition and self-efficacy are the most important proximal consequences of goal orientation followed by feedback-seeking, academic outcomes, and organizational outcomes.

In their review of the goal orientation literature, Vandewalle, Nerstad, and Dysvik strongly advocated that the relationship of goal orientation with an outcome variable such as task performance should be assessed in conjunction with moderator variables such as self-efficacy, commitment, and feedback on prior task performance.

Bandura defined self-efficacy as "a belief in one's ability to effectively perform and to exercise influence over events".

Metacognition is conceptualized as an individual's knowledge and regulation over one's own cognition. For example, Ford et al. linked mastery orientation and metacognitive activity and found that metacognitive activity was significantly related to knowledge acquisition, post-training performance, and self-efficacy.

In an organizational context, the extent to which employees actively seek feedback can positively influence job performance.

Consequently, individuals with high levels of mastery orientation are more inclined to seek feedback, while individuals with high levels of prove performance or avoid performance orientation are less inclined to seek feedback.

Goal orientations play a critical role in explaining academic performance. An individual's goal orientation has a significant impact on his or her cultivation of new skills, and thus has important implications for educators.

Classroom environments that foster comparison between students lead those students to develop performance-oriented attitudes toward education. Specifically, learning in a competitive environment leads students to become more performance oriented and more likely to sacrifice learning opportunities to be positively evaluated.

Conversely, a non-competitive, collaborative environment allows students to value learning rather than immediate performance success. Because goal orientation refers to individuals' behavioral tendencies in achievement-oriented tasks, it is intuitive to associate goal orientation with various academic outcomes.

According to Payne et al. assert that if all students are to move "through the increasing challenges and academic rigors" of school, then their motivation to learn must be identified and nurtured. Goal orientation has also been linked to organizational outcomes, specifically job performance.

found that individuals with high levels of trait and state achievement orientation and low levels of trait avoidant performance orientation had better job performance, prove performance orientation was unrelated to performance, and achievement orientation predicted job performance more accurately than both cognitive ability and the Big Five personality characteristics.

According to a meta-analysis, goal orientation is relevant when predicting subjective e. Research primarily centered on school and job performance outcomes has shown that goal orientation is linked to outcomes and performance.

The National Research Council recommends that when designing learning environments, there are three essential principles—as outlined in its report "How People Learn: Brain Mind Experience, and School"—that should be upheld: [35]. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history.

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Download as PDF Printable version. They may avoid telling friends how they did on an exam. The five subscales are based on work by Schommer The items were answered on a six-point Likert scale. We have adjusted the results so that the scores on each subscale are out of The five subscales are: 1.

Certain knowledge 2. Simple knowledge 3. Omniscient authority 4. Quick learning 5. Innate ability. Their beliefs can significantly affect their motivation, self-perception about their ability to learn and the strategies they select to support learning.

The combination of self-monitoring activities and learning strategies is known as self-regulated learning.

It ranges from the belief that knowledge is tentative and conditional to the belief that knowledge may be absolutely fixed and certain for all time. An example of belief in certain knowledge is "if two people are arguing about something, at least one of them must be wrong.

Self-regulated learning strategies. Learners who believe that knowledge is certain may have a low tolerance for ambiguity, preferring detailed, clearly defined instructions. These learners may not study an alternative perspective that is inconsistent with beliefs that currently dominate a field.

An example of belief in simple knowledge is "most things worth knowing are easy to understand. Learners who believe that knowledge is a collection of unrelated facts tend to study individual facts and ignore relationships among them.

Believing that knowledge is an accumulation of facts may lead to a failure to integrate information. People who score high on this subscale tend to believe that knowledge must be handed down by authorities, not derived by reason or observation.

A learner who believes that authorities have access to otherwise inaccessible knowledge is less likely to think critically during the learning process. Those who obtain high scores on this subscale believe that knowledge is acquired quickly or not at all. Those who obtain low scores believe that learning occurs gradually.

Learners who believe that knowledge is acquired quickly or not at all are less likely to persist when they encounter difficulties. They may study superficially, not investing the time required for deep understanding. They may view concentrated effort is a waste of time. They may accept the first source of information they locate when researching a topic instead of seeking multiple sources.

It ranges from the idea that intellectual ability can be developed by effort to the belief that it is fixed at birth.

Learners who believe that intelligence is fixed at birth may display helpless behavior in the face of a difficult task and are less likely to try different study strategies or persist in their efforts. Learners with this belief may miss opportunities to improve their learning skills by evaluating them after completing assignments.

Metacognitive skills include planning, selecting and monitoring learning strategies, as well as analyzing the effectiveness of learning strategies, and making modifications when required.

The instrument used in this exercise was developed by Schraw and Sperling-Denisson to measure knowledge and regulation of cognition in adult learners. The item Metacognitive Awareness Inventory MAI was administered to allow you to assess your knowledge about your learning strategies.

Knowledge about cognition is what students know about themselves. It represents the self-reflective aspect of metacognition such as the strategies, and conditions under which strategies are most useful.

An example of a knowledge about cognition item is "I am a good judge of how well I understand something. Application: Learners who score high on this subscale may be better able to judge whether they have mastered a skill or learned a concept.

They may be better able to predict how much time they will need to study a particular topic. Regulation of cognition corresponds to the metacognitive strategies that learners use to control their learning. An example of a regulation of cognition item is "I set specific goals before I begin a task.

Application: Learners who score high on this subscale may be better able to identify learning goals, select appropriate strategies, monitor progress toward a solution, modify strategies to achieve a goal and finally, evaluating the learning process.

Intrinsic Motivation: This is the degree to which students perceive themselves to be participating in a task for reasons such as challenges, curiosity, mastery etc.

Extrinsic motivation: The degree to which students perceive themselves to be participating in a task for reasons such as grades, evaluation by others and competition. Task Value: Students' evaluation of how interesting, how important and how useful the task is.

Control of learning beliefs: Students' beliefs that their efforts to learn will result in positive outcomes.