ED PSYCH 321 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Motivation, Stereotype Threat, Achievement Orientation
1 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Academic Achievement
●What is achievement?
○ The development of motives, capabilities, interests, and behavior that
have to do with performance in evaluative situations.
● As an adolescent issue;
○ Biological changes of puberty may direct attention away from academic
achievement.
○ Cognitive changes allow adolescents to apply higher-order cognitive skills
to school subjects.
○ Social changes direct adolescents to choose future educational and
occupational paths.
●Personal influences on achievement:
○ Self-control: The marshmallow test. Children who showed self-control
were more likely to be successful in school and work as adolescents and
adults.
○ Fear of failure: Feelings of anxiety during evaluations. Interferes with
successful performance. Interacts with adolescents’ achievement
motivation- underachievers.
○ Self-handicapping: Deliberately behaving in ways that will lead to failure.
■ Common strategies: Joking around in class, procrastination, turning
in incomplete homework.
■ Reasons: To gain respect from peers, to have excuse for poor
performance.
■ Likely that we all have done this at some level. When it becomes a
recurring pattern it can be something that should be addressed.
●Achievement of goal orientation:
○ Mastery motivation (learning how to do something, mastering a task)
■ Intrinsic motivation
■ Perform best in school
○ Performance motivation (doing something to gain a reward)
■ Extrinsic motivation
■ Can result from receiving incentives
●Achievement Beliefs:
○ Beliefs about stereotypes:
■ Stereotype threat: Students perform poorly because they’ve been
led to believe that members of their ethnic group or gender are
inherently less able than others.
○ Beliefs about intelligence, Fixed or malleable?
○ Attribution for success and failure:
Document Summary
The development of motives, capabilities, interests, and behavior that have to do with performance in evaluative situations. Biological changes of puberty may direct attention away from academic achievement. Cognitive changes allow adolescents to apply higher-order cognitive skills to school subjects. Social changes direct adolescents to choose future educational and occupational paths. Children who showed self-control were more likely to be successful in school and work as adolescents and adults. Fear of failure: feelings of anxiety during evaluations. Self-handicapping: deliberately behaving in ways that will lead to failure. Common strategies: joking around in class, procrastination, turning in incomplete homework. Reasons: to gain respect from peers, to have excuse for poor performance. Likely that we all have done this at some level. When it becomes a recurring pattern it can be something that should be addressed. Mastery motivation (learning how to do something, mastering a task) Performance motivation (doing something to gain a reward)
