As teachers we all dream about classrooms in which students are enthusiastic about learning and willing to persist in the face of difficult challenges. But in reality many of our students give up easily and avoid challenging learning situations. If you are like me, you tend to believe that children and adolescents either have the desire to persist or they do not, and there is not much we can do about it. But, recent research by Carol Dweck and her associates at Columbia University has changed my mind. Their research explains why it is that some children thrive on challenges and others withdraw and give up when learning becomes difficult. Most importantly, their studies show that it is possible to change students’ motivation for learning and to influence effort and persistence for learning. After studying this research, I am convinced that it can help us promote stronger motivation for learning in our students.

Characteristics of mastery and performance oriented students.

According to Dweck, students tend to be oriented either toward mastery or performance. This means that they have different types of achievement goals. In other words, when presented with tasks and challenges in school, these students have very different objectives in mind. Mastery oriented students are interested in improving their competence. They want to learn new skills and master new tasks. In contrast, performance oriented students focus not so much on learning, but on how their performance is judged by others. They are concerned about looking smart and not looking dumb to themselves, peers and teachers. These students have performance goals which as Dweck states, “is about winning positive judgments about your competence and avoiding negative ones.”

There are other characteristics associated with each orientation. Mastery-oriented students are more likely to persist in the face of difficulty. They tend to enjoy learning and like challenges that help them learn more. Their goal is to learn, regardless of how others evaluate their performance. In fact, they seem relatively unconcerned about grades. One particularly interesting study found that mastery oriented students do not evaluate themselves in terms of the standard terms of success and failure. When these students do poorly (by school standards), they tend to view the situation not as “failure” but as an indication that they have not yet found the best strategy or ways to overcome the challenge.

In contrast, performance-oriented students approach achievement situations with the idea of demonstrating their intelligence and ability. Unfortunately these students believe that intelligence is a fixed quantity. Children in this category blame their failures on their intelligence. They may say things like, “I never did have a good memory,” or “I guess I’m not very smart.” These children are so discouraged by difficulty they actually think they have more failures than successes. They will shrink their successes and inflate their failures. (Dweck & Reppucci).

Persistence in learning.

These are obviously two totally different views of learning, and there are some reasons why students with a mastery orientation are more likely to persevere when they encounter difficulty than those with a performance orientation. When faced with challenges, mastery oriented kids do not give up. Instead, they remain confident and give themselves self-motivating instructions such as, “The harder it gets, the harder I need to try,” or “Mistakes are our friends,” or “I love a challenge” (Dweck). These positive attitudes are part of the reason they persist with difficult situations. Another thing they might do is teach themselves new strategies to solve the problem at hand. Since learning is the main objective of this group they are not concerned with a grade, nor do they try to memorize things.

Performance oriented students are less likely to persist in the face of challenging circumstances. Initially they may attempt difficult tasks. But if they do not do well, they tend to conclude that they do not have the ability or talent to succeed. The focus on ability leads these students to the idea that if they cannot do a task quickly or easily, they probably cannot do it at all!

These differences in persistence reveal differences in students’ beliefs about the role of ability and effort in learning. Performance oriented students believe intelligence is a “fixed entity.” The entity theory suggests people have a certain amount of intelligence and there is nothing you can do about it. These people feel smart because they have succeeded at a variety of easy, low-effort tasks. Another theory is the “incremental theory” or the theory of malleable intelligence; it fosters the “learning goal.” In this theory, intelligence has a very different meaning. Intelligence is thought of as something you can increase by your efforts. People can strengthen their ability to learn and achieve higher intelligence. By trying new tasks, putting effort into mastering something and challenging their skills these students of the “incremental theory” feel smart. Instead of priding themselves on easy tasks they have overcome, these tasks are looked at as a waste of their time. Instead they seek out challenges and value effort over ability. Failure, or not doing well, actually motivates mastery oriented to work harder. Performance oriented students try at all costs to avoid being in situations where they might fail.

How to promote mastery orientation in school.

My initial belief was that few students in school are mastery oriented. But, Dweck found that about half the students in their studies (with thousands of students) were mastery-oriented. It is good to know that already a good portion of students value learning above performance. Dweck has done several studies to determine how to modify students’ orientations toward learning. The main idea is that teachers need to create a classroom environment in which learning is the primary goal. To do this teachers can

• work with children to set challenging goals for learning
• emphasize that challenging tasks are a way to improve competence
• give feedback and praise that focuses on students’ improvements, progress, and willingness to take risks and persist
• avoid praising students for their intelligence
• avoid false praise for accomplishing simple tasks
• encourage students to think of intelligence as a quality that can be changed through appropriate effort
  
• teach students to develop alternative strategies when they get stuck on difficult tasks

In the remainder of this workshop we will explore these ideas in more depth and talk about how we can develop strategies to develop the kind of motivation for learning we want for students, and also the kind of motivation that will have the most positive influence on their learning.

In the US cultures studies have shown that we are more performance orientated while the Asian cultures are more mastery orientated. Performance orientation looks at how we see failure. Our culture is all about how you look. If you look smart then your ok even if you don’t understand what is being learned. We also think learning has a lot to do with our ability instead of effort like the Asians do. A study was done with Americans, Chinese, and Japanese mothers were asked to rank the importance of ability and effort in their child’s learning. They all picked effort to be the most important but the Americans picked it lower than the Asian countries. Where as, the Americans picked ability higher than the Asian countries. American mothers were asked by experts how their child were doing in Math and if they needed to learn more because their (American students) scores were lower than the Asian countries. And most of the mothers said that their child was getting good grades and they didn’t see a problem with the low scores because their child was getting a good grade. Using performance orientation we look at performance goals more students are concerned more with their level of intelligence. They would rather look smart so they could avoid being dumb. Where as the Asians seem to thrive on mastery orientation which could be called learning goals. They are always looking to increase their competence. They look to master new skills and task and desire to get smarter. In the book The Learning Gap it stated in their how Asian students are treated at home when they bring home their scores. It seemed like no matter if the student got a 90% on a test or homework their was always room for improvement it seemed like they always could get better. But it seems like in the United States that most parents are just happy that the student passes a test. We seem to never push their effort. And that is also the administrations fault, because experts said that the United States lowers their standards so students don’t feel like they haven’t accomplished any thing. The United States is concerned about the self-esteem of students.

I feel that mastery orientation are more likely to persist in the face of difficulty than students with performance orientation because studies have shown that students with performance orientation seem to give up if they know that they have made mistakes on problems. Carol Diener has done a research with fifth and sixth grades. They were given a series of conceptual problems. The first eight problems were easy to solve and the next four problems were harder due to their age level. Carol Diener wanted to see the reaction of the mastery-orientated students versus the performance-orientated students. When she looked at the performance orientated group and they had found out that they didn’t have all of the problems right they started saying that they were “not very smart” and “I’m not good at this stuff”. They were making excuses even though those problems weren’t meant to be solved she was looking at how they would react. She then asked them if they could go back and redo the problems and they said that they couldn’t. They thought that they had more failure than they really did. When asked how many questions they had gotten right they had said four and they also said they had eight wrong when really it was the other way around. They had their mind made up that they were failures. Where as the mastery orientated students some of the students has self-motivating instructions. They were saying “The harder it gets, the harder I need to try” and “I should slow down and try to figure this out”. They would also remain confident that they could figure out the problem by saying “I’ve almost got it know”. Also the group had felt different about the problems they seemed to stay positive throughout the research they loved the challenge.

One aspect of the classroom teaching to adopt a mastery orientated is to not mark anything wrong maybe put an “x” by it or point out that maybe they don’t quite understand where you are coming from. But let them know that it’s not a mistake you just want them to reevaluate the answer. Litch and Dweck did this in a study. They gave a booklet to a class and when the students did the review booklet they put an “x” by the question and would tell the student “You didn’t quite get it all yet, so I would like you to review this”. By doing this the student didn't feel like they have failed. They may feel that they got most of the answer but there is just a piece missing to the puzzle. Another aspect of teaching in the classroom is to keep things positive. You want students to feel positive about themselves. In mastery orientation a study had shown that keeping students positive through the tough problems only helped them be successful in solving these problems. By doing this you are giving the students more confidence in themselves.