A Crucial Balance: Performance and Learning

Before I start this blog post, I want to give a few definitions of terms that I will be using throughout.

1.  Performance goals - This means that when a child is completing a task, they are solely concerned about looking smart to others.

2. Learning goals - When a child is completing a task, they are concerned with mastering the material.

3. Helpless response - This is when a child encounters failure they believe that the situation is out of their control and nothing can be done.

4. Mastery-Oriented Mindset - This is similar to a learning goal, the child, instead of focusing on performance, the child is focusing on learning and mastering the material.

In one of Dweck's experiments, she wanted to compare performance goals to learning goals. In the study, she randomly assigned students either a learning goal or a performance goal. She told the children in the performance goal group that they would be evaluated on their performance on the task. The children in the learning goal group were told that this exercise would allow them to learn some valuable things. For both groups, the problems were exactly the same, however, the results were radically different.

As the problems got difficult, children in the performance goal group began to show a helpless response. However, in the learning goal group, when faced with difficulty, instead of giving up these students stayed positive and focused on the task.

This simple experiment shows the power of goals in a classroom. If we focus on learning, students are more likely to stay positive in the face of failure. However, if we focus on performance, students will become more frustrated if they encounter difficulty.

Unfortunately, these two goals are often in conflict with each other. In the classroom, there needs to be some sort of evaluation method. Students have to be held accountable for their education through tests and quizzes. The question them becomes how can we find a balance between these two goals?

It turns out that we can still have performance goals in the classroom if we encourage a mastery-oriented mindset. In an experiment done on junior high students, Dweck and her colleagues gave students booklets that taught them how to solve new kinds of problems. On the back of each booklet, there was a short test to determine mastery of the material, a performance goal.

In the beginning of the study, they assessed which students had learning and performance goals. I'm guessing you already know the results. They found that students who had learning goals scored significantly higher on the test, showed about 50% more work than the students who had performance goals, and, according to their work, students with learning goals applied more of what they learned from the packet directly to the problems.

These concepts hopefully will allow me to work around the biggest problem in my research, time restrictions. By finding ways to create an environment where these responses are encouraged, we can help students become gritty and persevere in the face of failure.