Why we should focus our classrooms on promoting competence

Focus on honing your craft, rather than fixating on where you stand compared to others. That's one of the lessons of achievement goal theory, which describes the kinds of academic goals students focus upon. People with mastery goals are focused on developing their own competence, whereas those with performance goals are focused on winning comparisons with others. Mastery and performance goals can be further differentiated by whether people are seeking to achieve those goals (i.e., approach versions of mastery and performance goals) or concerned about failing to achieve those goals (i.e., avoidance versions). These goal orientations (i.e., mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, performance-approach, performance-avoidance) predict all kinds of academic outcomes. Given that, we'd like to see people have or develop more availing goal orientations (i.e., mastery-approach and/or performance-approach), but how stable are people's achievement goals, and how much do they change over time? Scherrer et al (in press) have conducted a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies of achievement goal theory to help us understand the answers to these questions.

It turns out, there is a significant amount of stability in people's achievement goal orientation scores (i.e., across all four types), particularly from year-to-year, from kindergarten through college. However, there is enough "wiggle" in the data to suggest that context and intervention can change people's achievement goal orientations, at least for some period of time. Likewise, there is a general downward trend in motivation from K to 12th grade, and then in college a separate downward trend in mastery-approach scores only. So what does all this mean? Well, a lot - I encourage you to read the paper. But a few highlights of the implications are that motivation changes over the entirety of schooling, not just at transition points (i.e., elementary to middle, middle to high school, high school to college) and that all educators would do well to create mastery-focused classroom goal structures, to push all students in a more positive direction. Perhaps the only person a student should focus upon out-performing is who the student was yesterday.