★ Must-know
📌 In cooperative goal structures, students believe they can reach their goal only if other students also reach theirs; in competitive structures, they believe they can reach it only if others do not; in individualistic structures, their efforts are unrelated to other students’ efforts.
📌 Goal commitment strengthens the relationship between higher goals and better performance, and students’ acceptance of goals can be increased by involving them in setting goals, having them write and track goals, and sharing goals with a respected friend or teacher (Locke & Latham, 2002; Klein et al., 2020).
Further detail
Third-grade students who received progress feedback on their writing alongside goal setting improved writing fluency significantly more than students who received a goal alone (Koenig et al., 2016).
Cooperative structures are associated with:
Competitive structures are associated with:
Individualistic structures are associated with:
Progress feedback highlights distance already traveled; deficit feedback highlights distance still to go.
★ Must-know
📌 A mastery goal orientation focuses on individual development and learning, whereas a performance goal orientation focuses on demonstrating competence to others or outperforming them.
📌 Achievement goal orientations combine mastery or performance goals with either an approach focus or an avoidance focus: mastery-approach seeks learning and self-improvement, mastery-avoidance fears misunderstanding or falling short of personal potential, performance-approach seeks superiority or appearing competent, and performance-avoidance seeks to avoid appearing incompetent or being last.
Further detail
Performance-goal students may:
Failure-avoiding strategies are associated with:
🔄 The possible progression is (Brophy, 2005):
Students’ personal goal orientations tend to align with classroom goal structures; a positive classroom climate emphasizing learning and mastery is associated with higher student mastery goals (Bardach et al., 2020).
Social goals can support learning through academically oriented friends, family or team honor, and peer groups that value academics, but maintaining friendly relations can impede learning when students avoid challenging peers’ incorrect answers (Juvonen & Knifsend, 2016; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2000; Pintrich, 2003; Rogat & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2019; Ryan, 2001; Zusho & Clayton, 2011).
Mastery measures growth against the task; performance measures competence against other people.
★ Must-know
📌 Task value includes importance or attainment value (personal significance and identity needs), interest or intrinsic value (enjoyment of the activity), and utility value (usefulness for short- or long-term goals) (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020; Hulleman & Barron, 2016).
Further detail
📌 Expectancy for success, self-efficacy, and academic self-concept are correlated but distinct: self-efficacy concerns capability for a particular task, while expectancy for success can also reflect contextual factors such as perceived teacher bias (Marsh et al., 2019; Usher, 2015).
Students taught how mathematics applies to everyday life, such as calculating a skateboard’s downhill slope, reported greater value for mathematics (Matthews, 2018). - Jamaal Matthews
Among Korean middle-school students, perceiving mathematics as more costly was associated with greater anxiety and procrastination and less organization in mathematics (Jiang et al., 2020).
Expectancies, values, and costs predict activity and course choices, persistence, achievement, leaving a major, advanced-degree pursuit, and career choices; both expected success and task value are needed to sustain high performance and persistence (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020).
★ Must-know
Weiner and Graham classify attributed causes of success and failure by locus (internal or external), stability (consistent or changing across time and situations), and controllability (whether the person can control the cause) (Graham, 2020; Graham & Weiner, 2012; Weiner, 1986, 2018).
Stable failure attributions lead students to expect future failure, internal attributions link outcomes to self-esteem, and controllable attributions influence achievement emotions such as guilt for responsible failure and pride for responsible success (Graham, 2020; Weiner, 2018).
Learned helplessness can cause (Alloy & Seligman, 1979): motivational impairment, cognitive deficits through missed practice and improvement opportunities, depression, anxiety, listlessness
Further detail
Luck is an external, unstable, and uncontrollable attribution, whereas ability is usually considered stable and uncontrollable.
They may attribute failure to (Grassinger & Dresel, 2018):
Students with low self-efficacy may attribute failure to stable, uncontrollable lack of ability, which is associated with resignation, depression, helplessness, and a downward spiral of failure and concealment (Hsieh & Kang, 2010; Weiner, 2000, 2010).
In Hiroto and Seligman's 1975 experiment, subjects who first struggled with unsolvable puzzles later solved significantly fewer solvable puzzles than subjects who had not faced the unsolvable puzzles. - Hiroto & Seligman
Cause dimensions shape expectations, self-esteem, and achievement emotions.
★ Must-know
When teachers attribute student failure to uncontrollable forces, they tend to respond with sympathy and avoid punishment; when they attribute it to controllable causes such as lack of effort, they are more likely to show irritation or anger and reprimand students. - Weiner, 1986, 2000, 2011
Students whose mistakes receive pity, praise for a good try, or unsolicited help are more likely to attribute their failure to an uncontrollable cause, usually lack of ability. - Sandra Graham, 2020
📌 A fixed mindset treats abilities as stable, uncontrollable, set traits, whereas a growth mindset treats them as unstable, controllable, and improvable.
Further detail
In feedback studies, White teachers and undergraduate essay raters gave essays attributed to Black and Latino students more positive feedback than the same essays attributed to White students. - Harber et al.
Dweck found that about 40% of students hold a fixed mindset, 40% hold a growth mindset, and the rest fall between them.
Around age 11 or 12, children begin differentiating effort, ability, and performance, and mindsets begin to influence motivation. - Muenks & Miele, 2017
Students with fixed mindsets tend to set performance-avoidance goals, seek situations where they can look smart, and avoid effort or risks that could expose failure.
Students experiencing academic challenges or setbacks are more negatively affected by fixed mindsets, although in some contexts and cultures, such as China, fixed mindset is not associated with achievement. - Yeager et al., 2019
Fixed abilities are treated as set; growth abilities as improvable through learning
★ Must-know
📌 Failure avoidance leads students to stick to familiar tasks or avoid risks, whereas self-handicapping creates obstacles such as feeble effort, extreme goals, or procrastination so failure can be blamed on external causes. - Graham, 2020
Students who are not fearful of failure tend to set moderately difficult goals, take risks, cope constructively with failure, welcome concrete feedback, seek help, and persist in learning. - Covington & Mueller, 2001
Teachers can support growth mindsets by (Dweck, 2013): teaching how learning changes the brain, acting as coaches rather than judges, praising strategies and effort linked to learning, giving constructive criticism, presenting skills as not yet mastered rather than unattainable
Further detail
Self-handicapping can damage achievement, with stronger effects reported among elementary- and middle-school students. - Schwinger et al., 2014
Fourth- and fifth-grade children whose parents viewed failure as debilitating were more likely to view intelligence as fixed. - Kyla Haimovitz and Carol Dweck, 2016
Praising effort without connecting it to effective learning processes can act as a consolation prize and reinforce a fixed mindset. - Jere Brophy, 1981
A person can have a predominantly growth mindset in one area while particular triggers prompt fixed-mindset responses. - Dweck, Gross-Loh, 2016
Avoid failure, self-handicap to deflect blame, or welcome failure as diagnostic feedback
★ Must-know
📌 Situational interest is a short-lived response to environmental features that catch and hold attention, whereas individual interest is a relatively enduring desire to engage with a subject or activity.
📌 Curiosity arises when attention focuses on resolving uncertainty and filling a knowledge gap, whereas interest involves an ongoing desire to engage with a topic. - Grossnickle, 2016
Further detail
Interest in school generally declines from elementary to high school, with greater declines among boys than girls, and the transition to middle school is particularly associated with declining interest. - Wang et al., 2015
Interest is related to (Linnenbrink-Garcia & Patail, 2016):
Computers, groups, and puzzles caught secondary students' interest in mathematics, while real-life problems and active laboratory experiments and projects helped maintain it. - Mathew Mitchell, 1993
Strategies that can trigger or support interest include (Renninger & Bachrach, 2015): challenge, choice, novelty, fantasy, collaboration, hands-on activities and experiments, student explanations, instructional conversations, expert roles, personal relevance, utility value, and group projects
Personalized education can connect learning to students through (Reber et al., 2018): outside interests, choices in content or demonstration, connections between lessons and students' lives
Interesting but irrelevant seductive details can distract from main ideas and impair learning, especially when material is complex and places high demands on working memory. - Park et al., 2015
Complex materials can be more interesting than simple materials when students have a growth mindset and believe they can cope with the complexity. - Sylvia et al., 2009
★ Must-know
📌 Flow occurs when a task presents high challenge matched by high levels of the skills needed to meet it.
Further detail
Students need some base of knowledge to recognize gaps that can lead to curiosity, and guessing followed by feedback can help reveal those gaps. - Ainley, 2019
Maslow (1970) predicted that fulfilling the need to know increases, rather than decreases, the desire to know more.
Curiosity has been associated with greater motivation, exploration, memory, learning, and well-being. - Jirout et al., 2018
People in flow tend to enjoy the task, continue working without prompting, and produce higher-quality, more creative work. - Abuhamdeh & Csikszentmihalyi, 2012
Csikszentmihalyi found flow less common in school than at work, where people tend to have clear goals, immediate feedback, and opportunities to apply their skills.
Optimal learning environments for flow combine high challenge, intrinsic satisfaction, personal meaning, and activities connecting intellectual and emotional engagement through work-like and play-like structures. - David Shernoff and his colleagues, 2014
📌 Differentiation develops individual interests, whereas integration focuses on shared interests.
Challenge matched to skill sustains flow; too little challenge or skill leads toward boredom or apathy.
★ Must-know
Emotions arise through interplay among bodily responses, cognitive interpretations and predictions, conscious feelings, past experience, and situational context. - Barrett, 2017
Emotions can direct attention and affect learning, memory, decision making, intrinsic motivation, dopamine levels, neural firing, and working-memory resources. - Pekrun et al., 2006
📌 Pekrun’s taxonomy classifies achievement emotions by object focus (activity or anticipated or past outcome), valence (positive or negative), and activation (activating or deactivating).
Further detail
Activated positive achievement emotions are associated with greater interest, intrinsic motivation, self-regulation, and learning, while deactivating negative emotions tend to reduce motivation. - Pekrun, 2017
Boredom can reduce attention and meaning-making, contributing to weak effort, shallow processing, poor self-regulated learning, and inferior learning, which can in turn deepen boredom. - Pekrun et al., 2017
In a survey of over 20,000 high school students, 40% reported feeling tired, 29% stressed, 26% bored, 12% anxious, 23% happy, and 5% excited at school. - Moeller et al., 2020
📌 Students are more likely to experience negative emotions when they perceive little control over learning activities and place little value on them; greater control predicts more enjoyment and less boredom when students also value math. - Putwain et al., 2018
📌 Higher arousal generally helps with simple tasks, whereas lower arousal is better for complex tasks such as taking the SAT or GRE.
★ Must-know
Academic anxieties include test, math, science, and public-speaking anxiety, which can hamper performance and promote disengagement in learning. - Cassady, 2010
Anxiety can create a cycle in which poor performance increases anxiety, and anxiety contributes to further poor performance.
Anxiety can disrupt learning in three phases: (Zeidner & Matthews, 2011):
Teachers can help students cope with test anxiety by: clarifying instructions, avoiding unnecessary time pressure, reducing the stakes of major tests, offering alternatives to written tests, teaching self-regulation before, during, and after tests
Further detail
📌 Academic anxiety has a trait component brought across learning situations and a state component triggered by situational perceptions of threat or self-doubt. - Covington, 1992
📌 Anxiety has a cognitive component of worry and negative thoughts and an affective component involving physiological and emotional reactions such as a racing heartbeat or fear. - Jain & Dowson, 2009
Students can manage anxiety with problem-focused strategies such as planning study schedules, emotion-focused strategies such as relaxation, or avoidance strategies that may reduce anxiety short term but increase it long term. - Zeidner & Matthews, 2011
Anxious learners may choose extremely difficult tasks likely to end in failure or extremely easy tasks that provide little satisfaction to support further effort.
Anxious learners may study for longer but tend to use repetitive, low-quality methods. - Cassady, 2004
Teachers can reduce environmental anxiety triggers by: examining biases and reducing stereotype-threat messages, promoting mastery-oriented goals, offering positive role models, framing assignments as feasible, avoiding visible distress about tests
Preparation → performance → reflection: anxiety can disrupt each phase.
★ Must-know
📌 Motivation to learn involves thoughtful, active study strategies, not merely persistence or an intention to learn.
📌 Teachers have an immediate goal of engaging students productively in classwork and a longer-term goal of developing enduring motivation grounded in individual interests and personal agency.
Further detail
Engagement can increase motivation, which leads to more learning, and learning can in turn strengthen motivation. - Reeve & Lee, 2014
Students’ motivation to learn is supported by intrinsic interests, satisfied needs and autonomy, clear mastery goals, positive success expectancies, meaningful tasks, perceived competence, controllable attributions, a growth mindset, and positive emotions.
Students commonly ask whether learning is valuable and relevant, enjoyable, achievable, and socially inclusive, as well as why they are learning it. - Committee on Increasing High School Students' Engagement and Motivation to Learn, 2004
Jere Brophy (2008) argued that powerful ideas enrich students' subjective lives by giving them lenses for viewing the world, tools for decisions, and ways to appreciate beauty.
When the connection between material and students' lives is unclear, teachers can explain it or invite students to choose how to explain its importance to their lives (Rosenzweig et al., 2019).
📌 Rewards may undermine intrinsic motivation when students are already interested in the activity (Hidi, 2016).
Examples of ill-structured real-world problems include:
Teachers can invite students to connect learning with their self-interests and communities and to explain how a task could benefit them personally or be meaningful to others (Triniski et al., 2019).
★ Must-know
Teachers can arouse curiosity by pointing out puzzling discrepancies between students' beliefs and the facts.
Self-determination and an internal locus of causality are important for sustaining intrinsic motivation and engagement (Jang et al., 2010; Reeve, 2018).
📌 To support autonomy, teachers can offer a range of relevant options while avoiding so many or such unstructured choices that students are left unguided (Katz & Assor, 2007; Patall & Hooper, 2019).
Further detail
Student interests that can connect to class activities include (Reber et al., 2018):
Stipek (2002) described a teacher who prompted discussion by revealing that other planets have no atmospheric oxygen after students agreed that people need oxygen to breathe.
Teachers can make learning fun through appropriately used simulations or games.
Task goal structures can be:
Areas in which students can have input include:
Bounded choice guides learning; unguided choice can derail it.
★ Must-know
Teachers can build confidence by beginning work at students' current levels and moving in small steps, with both easy and difficult questions so students can experience success and challenge.
Learning goals should be clear, specific, and attainable in the near future; long-term projects can be divided into subgoals, and students can choose among goals of different difficulty.
Teachers can emphasize students' progress relative to their own past performance, provide specific feedback and corrections, and point out improvements rather than comparing students with one another.
Frequent opportunities to answer questions, complete short assignments, or demonstrate skills let teachers correct problems quickly before students practice errors for too long.
Further detail
Academic ability is improvable and specific to the task, so difficulty with algebra does not necessarily mean difficulty with geometry.
Modeling problem solving, including trying several approaches, shows students that learning can involve difficulty and errors even for the teacher.
Creating a finished product can help students persist and focus because they can see the endpoint of their work.
📌 Heavy emphasis on grades and competition can shift students' attention from learning to performance and especially harm anxious students.
📌 Teachers can model motivation to learn by discussing their interest in the subject and how they handle difficult learning tasks (Xu et al., 2012).
📌 Teachers should teach the learning strategies students need to master material and help them develop strategies for coping with anxiety in learning and testing.
Set reachable goals, notice progress, and build toward mastery.
★ Must-know
Students' motives, goals, interests, beliefs, and emotions develop in relation to sociocultural contexts and lived experiences (Nolen, 2020).
Belonging-supportive strategies include (Kaleen Healey and Chloe Stroman, 2021): respecting each student's identity, affirming capacity to succeed with high expectations and support, recognizing student agency and contributions, challenging exclusionary practices, policies, and norms, using culturally continuous instruction that counters negative stereotypes, ensuring respectful and equitable system-level practices
The basic organizational task for teachers is to establish order and harmony by gaining and maintaining students’ cooperation in classroom activities. - Doyle, 2006
Further detail
In Saira Matthews's account, choosing literature by Black authors helped her feel competent as a reader, increased her pleasure in writing, and strengthened her confidence through cultural connection.
Mrs. Smith's reading choices supported Saira's autonomy, interest, competence, and cultural connection, illustrating how opportunity structures can support motivation and belonging (Gray et al., 2018).
📌 Teachers can learn family goals by meeting with families or sending questionnaires, then developing and sharing plans to support a child's goals at school and at home.
📌 Teachers can help families track progress with goal cards or progress charts and invite caregiver feedback on their support for children's learning.
📌 Teachers can build confidence with families by avoiding comparisons between siblings and asking family members to identify strengths and one area for improvement in homework.
Families can help show the value of learning by demonstrating how they use mathematics or writing at work and identifying useful skills for home, such as tracking expenditures, writing to service providers, or researching vacation destinations.
Teachers can support families' skills and confidence by sharing study strategies and involving older students in a homework hotline to help younger students.
Families can celebrate learning by visiting student-created unit museums and portfolios or viewing student-work exhibits at local grocery stores, libraries, or community centers.
Classrooms have six distinctive features: (Doyle, 2006):
Students’ classroom-management challenges change with age: young children need direct teaching of rules and procedures; middle-elementary students need new activity procedures taught and routines maintained; older elementary students may test authority; and high-school students need relevant curricula and support for self-management.
Identity-respecting opportunities → stronger motivation and belonging.
★ Must-know
Good classroom organization gives all students access to learning by making participation expectations clear and, when needed, directly teaching and practicing participation behaviors.
An estimated 80% of instructional time is engaged time, and about 80% of engaged time is academic learning time, yielding approximately 62 hours of academic learning time from 126 mandated hours.
📌 Classroom management aims to develop students’ self-management, not merely their compliance with rules, because complex learning structures require students to manage their own behavior and learning.
Further detail
A typical high-school class is mandated to meet 126 hours per school year, but absences and interruptions reduce available learning time to about 119 hours, and classroom demands reduce actual instructional time to about 96 hours.
High-quality, trusting teacher–student relationships are associated with less defiance and absenteeism, more appropriate help-seeking, and greater student achievement.
Students develop self-control through: (Bear, 2005):
Emmer and Evertson's classroom-management research found that teachers who applied principles drawn from observations of effective classrooms had fewer problems, more student learning time, less disruption, and higher achievement. - Emmer & Evertson, 2017
Access opens participation; time supports learning; relationships build cooperation; self-management prepares independence.
★ Must-know
Further detail
In-person routines should cover (Romano & Weinstein, 2019):
Rules should be positive and observable, and a few general rules covering many situations are preferable to exhaustive lists, except when a specific prohibited action must be made explicit. - Emmer & Gerwels, 2006
The four suggested general elementary-class rules are (Evertson and Emmer, 2017):
The five suggested secondary-class rules are (Emmer and Evertson, 2017):
In a study of 34 middle school classrooms, explicit rules about respecting others predicted how many students participated in class discussions. - Lindsay Matsumura, 2008
A constructive response to misbehavior should (Charles & Cole, 2019): separate the deed from the doer, emphasize students' choice and control over their actions, encourage reflection and problem solving instead of lecturing, help students explain what they could do differently next time
Teachers should decide positive and negative consequences before students follow or break a rule or procedure so that students know what to expect.
Students need trust in the teacher and classroom community before they can contribute meaningfully to establishing rules or a class constitution. - M. J. Elias & Schwab, 2006
Rules should help students understand why behaviors are right or wrong and enable everyone to work and learn together, rather than teaching that an action is wrong merely because a rule prohibits it. - C. S. Weinstein, 1999
Routines explain how activities are done; rules specify which behaviors are expected or forbidden.
★ Must-know
Important remote and hybrid teaching competencies include (Emily Pulham and Charles Graham, 2018):
Remote learners still need to be managed as a cohesive group through cooperation, community, engaging learning, routines, and relationships. - Heather Wolpert-Gawron, 2017
Further detail
🔄 At the first online session, teachers should: tour the virtual classroom, show where schedules and assignments are located, establish and post expectations, provide a recording students can review
Effective videoconferencing preparation includes: restarting devices and turning off notifications, closing unnecessary applications, placing devices on a stable surface, muting microphones before joining, messaging the teacher about technical trouble
Video-class norms include:
Video-discussion norms include:
Remote teachers can build community by: helping students share interests and experiences, forming purposeful small groups, having groups create work contracts, requiring school names in online profiles, keeping contact information for students and caregivers
Remote teachers should: set virtual office hours, participate in discussions, check in on students, communicate appropriately with whole classes or individuals, make availability boundaries clear
Plagiarism prevention should include: requiring source citation, requiring students' own words or marked quotations, explaining that plagiarism is detectable, discussing examples
Remote teachers should manage time by setting assignment deadlines and interim deadlines and using a class calendar and automatic reminders when possible.
📌 Synchronous classes occur live through online meetings, whereas asynchronous classes involve students working independently. - Kelly L. Hoy, September 2020
★ Must-know
📌 Horizontal rows support independent work, presentations, and pair work but are poor for large-group discussion; clusters and circles support interaction and group work but are poor for whole-group presentations and may complicate management.
Further detail
Front seats appear to increase participation and learning for students already predisposed to speak, while back seats can make participation harder and daydreaming easier. - Blume et al., 2019
A fishbowl or stack seating formation can build group cohesion and support demonstrations, brainstorming, or viewing small visual aids, but should be used only briefly because it is uncomfortable and can lead to discipline problems.
Changes to classroom interest areas have been associated with greater girls' participation in a science center, more experimentation with manipulative materials, and increased literature activity after changes to a library corner. - Carol Weinstein, 1977
Personal territories and interest areas can be combined by placing student desks in the center and interest areas around the room's edges to accommodate both large- and small-group activities.
| Structure | Relation to others | Associated effects |
|---|---|---|
| Cooperative | Goal depends on others succeeding | Inclusion, positive relationships, collective efficacy |
| Competitive | Goal depends on others failing | Extrinsic motivation, exclusion, stress |
| Individualistic | Efforts are unrelated | Intrinsic motivation, interest, intrapersonal growth |
| Orientation | Approach focus | Avoidance focus |
|---|---|---|
| Mastery | Learn and improve | Avoid misunderstanding or falling short |
| Performance | Demonstrate superiority or competence | Avoid appearing incompetent or being last |
Take a 63-question practice quiz on Motivation, Flow, and Emotions, with every answer explained.
1. A student is halfway toward a project goal. Which feedback is most likely to strengthen the student's self-efficacy and perseverance?
2. In a group assignment, Maya believes she can reach her goal only if her classmates also reach theirs. Which goal structure does this describe?
Memorize the key concepts of Motivation, Flow, and Emotions with 95 flashcards.
According to Bandura (1997), what kind of feedback enhances self-efficacy and perseverance?
Feedback emphasizing progress toward a goal.
In cooperative goal structures, when do students believe they can reach their goal?
Only if other students also reach theirs.
What happens when learning tasks connect to competence, self-direction, and connection, according to Boden et al. (2020) and Vansteenkiste et al. (2006)?
Deeper information processing and persistence increase.
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