Goal theory is the label used in educational psychology to discuss research into motivation to learn. Goals of learning are thought to be a key factor influencing the level of a student's intrinsic motivation.
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Main axes of goal theory
Research in goal theory has identified the following dichotomies:
Task/ego involvement
A student is described as task-involved when he is interested in the task for its own qualities. This is associated with higher intrinsic motivation. Task-involved students are less threatened by failure because their own ego is not tied up in the success of the task.
A student who is ego-involved will be seeking to perform the task to boost their own ego, for the praise that completing the task might attract, or because completing the task confirms their own self-concept (e.g. clever, strong, funny etc...) Ego-involved students can become very anxious or discouraged in the face of failure, because such failure challenges their self-concept.
Approach/avoidance goals
Not all goals are directed towards approaching a desirable outcome (e.g., demonstrating competence). Goals can also be directed towards avoiding an undesirable outcome (e.g., avoiding the demonstration of incompetence to others).
It is thought that approach goals contribute positively to intrinsic motivation whereas avoidance goals do not.
Performance Goals
Definition: A goal focused on gaining favorable judgement or avoiding unfavorable judgements by others.
General Information: Performance goals fall under the goal theory category for motivation. Within this theory is the idea that persons become motivated by internal goals or simply outdoing others. Performance goals focuses on ensuring that one's performance is noticeably superior to others. This motivation to outperform those around them is what enables the person to strive for more achievement in and outside of school and work as well.
In the Classroom: Performance goals can heavily impact adolescents in the classroom. This deep desire to out-do those around you can alter classroom ideologies in each student; some for the better and sometimes for the worse. For the betterment of performance in class, performance goals lead to students to place a greater importance on GPA and class rankings. This in turn, leads to better academic performance. Along with a focus on grades, students see exams as a competitive competition that also allows them to enhance their performance. There is a significant advantage in academic performance in students who possess performance goals in the classroom. It also generates a healthy form of competition between peers enhancing peer relationships and grades among all of those particular students. Performance goals lead to a strong sense of commitment that can appear in the classroom and also outside of the classroom as well. The student exemplifies a strong relationship with the goal of doing better than others, and this leads to a longterm commitment of achieving that goal. [5] On the other hand, there can be extensive down-sides that can come along with focusing entirely on out-performing others. There comes a conflict when the students attempts to genuinely, fully comprehend new information on top of trying to focus on doing better than those around them. The student simply cannot handle the pressure of learning and constant competition. One of those variable must alter. Other concerns involve stress on the student to try to keep up with those around them, tension in the classroom as a student struggles with asking questions for fear of seeming incapable to others, and anxiety and frustration with all of those variable on top of each other. Students with performance goals face a challenge when thinking about future education in universities and higher institutions. They view this as a constant challenge to out-do everyone around them instead of seeing it as an opportunity to learn more than ever before. They are so consumed with the competitive mentality that they lack the ability to truly learn the plethora of information available to them. Performance goals lead to heavy distractions in the minds of these students due to the fact that they are so consumed with bettering their performance in the eyes of others that they cannot focus on anything else. [3] There is also another concern that these students with performance goals are concerned with more shallow rewards than fruitful knowledge. They feel accomplished when they receive a better grade on the test than everyone else, but that can simply be linked to memorization and not full comprehension. [4] All in all, performance goals can have both positive and negative impacts on students in the classroom. These effects can have lasting impacts even outside of the classroom.
Maps Goal theory
Other developments
Other researchers have adopted a more complex perspective on goals, arguing that there are many different kinds of goals individuals can have in achievement settings. For instance, Ford and Nichols (1987) extended this point of view into within-person goals and person-environment goals, which lays equal significance on learners per se and learning environment.
Nevertheless, all the theories are devoted to studying the types of goals as well as their impact on multiple facets of learning. In other words, research that takes goals as a dependent variable remains scarce. Such a strategy to take goals for granted could be defended on the grounds that one cannot deal with all aspects of so complex an issue and that the theorists possibly feel the question of how goals originate was not relevant to the models they developed.
On the other hand, young children are frequently ignored within this area, based on the assumption that they might not have a clear pattern of setting a goal or they even do not own a goal when starting a task. Klahr argued that although there are large adult-child differences in overall problem-solving performance, even preschoolers have rudimentary forms of strategies such as means-ends analysis that rely on the use of goals. Thus, expanding the subject selection range and focusing on the process of goal-setting are expected to be the two main tasks in future research direction.
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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