★ Must-know
📌 In cooperative goal structures, students believe they can attain their goals only if other students also attain theirs; in competitive structures, they believe they can attain theirs only if others do not; in individualistic structures, their attempts are unrelated to others’ attempts.
📌 Goal commitment strengthens the relationship between higher goals and better performance, and teachers can encourage commitment by involving students in goal setting, having them write and track goals, or encouraging them to share goals with a respected person (Locke & Latham, 2002; Klein et al., 2020).
Feedback that highlights progress toward a goal rather than the remaining deficit enhances self-efficacy and perseverance (Bandura, 1997).
Compared with shared goals, competitive goals are associated with worse student performance and peer relationships (Roseth et al., 2008).
Further detail
Third-grade students who received progress feedback alongside goal setting improved their writing fluency significantly more than students who received goal setting alone (Koenig et al., 2016).
Connecting learning tasks to intrinsic needs for competence, self-direction, and connection with others is associated with deeper information processing and longer persistence, whereas linking tasks to external standards promotes rote learning (Vansteenkiste et al., 2006; Boden et al., 2020).
Progress feedback builds perseverance; deficit-focused feedback emphasizes what remains.
★ 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. - Urdan & Kaplan, 2020
Mastery-approach goals focus on learning and understanding, mastery-avoidance goals on avoiding misunderstanding, performance-approach goals on demonstrating superiority, and performance-avoidance goals on avoiding appearing incompetent.
Teachers can support learning by setting clear, specific, reasonable, moderately challenging, short-term goals; comparing students’ progress with their own rather than with classmates; and rewarding learning and improvement rather than appearances or performance alone.
Students with mastery goals tend to: seek challenges, persist through difficulty, feel better about their work, seek appropriate help, use deeper cognitive processing and study strategies, approach academic tasks with confidence
Further detail
Students pursuing performance goals to outperform others may choose easy tasks, avoid collaboration, focus only on graded work, use shortcuts or cheat, and feel uncomfortable with unclear evaluation criteria.
Failure-avoiding strategies are associated with helplessness, truancy, school disengagement, negative emotions, and lower academic achievement (De Castella et al., 2013; Huang, 2016).
Students’ personal goal orientations tend to align with classroom goal structures, and classrooms that emphasize learning and mastery are associated with higher student mastery goals (Bardach et al., 2020).
Social goals can support learning when students choose mastery-oriented friends or belong to academically supportive groups, but maintaining friendly relations can hinder learning when peers avoid challenging wrong answers.
Mastery aims to improve; performance aims to demonstrate competence.
★ Must-know
📌 Expectancy for success, self-efficacy, and academic self-concept are correlated but distinct: self-efficacy concerns capability for a particular task, while expectancy can also reflect circumstances such as perceived teacher bias. - Marsh et al., 2019
📌 Task value includes importance or attainment value (personal significance), interest or intrinsic value (enjoyment), utility value (usefulness for goals), and perceived cost (the sacrifices or risks of engaging). - Eccles & Wigfield, 2020
Further detail
★ Must-know
📌 Attributions of success and failure can be classified by locus (internal or external), stability (stable or changing over time and situations), and controllability (controllable or uncontrollable). - Bernard Weiner and Sandra Graham
Stable attributions influence expectations about future outcomes; internal attributions link success with pride and increased motivation and failure with diminished self-esteem; controllable causes of failure can lead to guilt, while uncontrollable failure can lead to shame or anger (Graham, 2020; Weiner, 2018).
Students with low self-efficacy may attribute failure to lack of ability, a stable and uncontrollable cause that can contribute to resignation, depression, helplessness, and a downward spiral of failure and concealment.
Learned helplessness can produce (Alloy & Seligman, 1979):
Attributional retraining teaches students to explain challenges more adaptively, for example by attributing outcomes to unstable and controllable factors, which can increase optimism about improving performance. - Perry & Hamm, 2017
Further detail
Luck is an example of an external, unstable, and uncontrollable cause, whereas ability is usually considered stable and uncontrollable.
Students with strong self-efficacy and mastery goals often attribute failure to controllable factors such as insufficient effort, misunderstanding directions, or inadequate studying, and then focus on strategies for future success. - Grassinger & Dresel, 2018
Teachers tend to respond with sympathy and avoid punishment when they attribute student failure to uncontrollable causes, but tend to feel irritation or anger and reprimand students when they attribute failure to controllable causes such as lack of effort. - Weiner, 1986, 2000, 2011
Pity, praise for a good try, or unsolicited help from teachers can lead students to attribute their own failure to an uncontrollable cause, usually lack of ability. - Sandra Graham, 2020
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
Locate the cause, assess its stability, then ask whether it is controllable.
★ Must-know
Students with fixed mindsets tend to pursue performance-avoidance goals, cheat, and choose tasks they can do without much effort or risk of failure to protect their self-esteem.
Students with growth mindsets tend to choose moderately difficult goals and focus on problem-solving processes and strategies rather than test scores and grades. - Anderman, 2021
Students who welcome failure set moderately difficult goals, take risks, cope constructively with setbacks, seek feedback and help, and learn persistently. - Covington & Mueller, 2001
Teachers can support growth mindsets by (Dweck, 2013): teaching how learning changes the brain, acting as learning coaches rather than judges of ability, giving feedback on learning processes and strategies, offering constructive criticism focused on improvement, emphasizing that skills can be mastered
Further detail
Dweck found that about 40% of students hold a fixed mindset, about 40% hold a growth mindset, and the rest fall between the two.
At around age 11 or 12, children begin differentiating effort, ability, and performance, and mindsets begin to influence motivation. - Muenks & Miele, 2017
Self-handicapping strategies include (Graham, 2020):
Children whose parents view failure as debilitating are more likely to view intelligence as fixed. - Kyla Haimovitz and Carol Dweck, 2016
Praising effort alone after failure can communicate low ability as a consolation prize; praise should instead be tied to processes and strategies that support learning. - Jere Brophy, 1981
Fixed ability is a ceiling; growth ability is a muscle that can improve.
★ Must-know
📌 Situational interest is a shorter-lived interest sparked by environmental features, whereas individual interest is a relatively enduring desire to engage with a subject or activity. - Ann Renninger and Suzanne Hidi, 2016
📌 Curiosity arises when attention focuses on resolving uncertainty or 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 boys showing greater declines than girls, and the transition to middle school is particularly associated with declining interest. - Wang et al., 2015
Situational interest can be triggered and supported by (Renninger & Bachrach, 2015):
Personalized learning can (Reber et al., 2018): connect lessons to students’ outside interests, offer choice in what or how they learn, invite students to connect content to their own lives
Interesting but irrelevant seductive details can divert attention from main ideas and impair learning, particularly when material is complex and demands substantial working memory. - Park et al., 2015
Triggered situation → maintained situation → emerging individual → established individual.
★ Must-know
📌 Flow occurs when a task’s high challenge is matched by high relevant skill; when challenge or skill is insufficient, students may instead experience apathy or boredom.
Teachers can connect learning to students’ experiences, interests, hobbies, and cultures through correspondence, community experts, role exchanges, interviews, relevant books, and interest-based choices.
Curiosity can be encouraged by building on students’ prior knowledge, inviting guesses and giving feedback, and using mistakes to reveal gaps in knowledge. - Ainley, 2019
Further detail
Teachers can use humor, personal experiences, anecdotes, original sources, and surprising activities to spark student interest and curiosity.
Fulfilling the need to know can increase the desire to know more, as Maslow predicted.
Curiosity is associated with (Jirout et al., 2018):
People in flow tend to enjoy the task, continue without prompting, and produce higher-quality, more creative work. - Abuhamdeh & Csikszentmihalyi, 2012
A task that is too easy invites boredom; a challenging task matched to skill can draw students into flow.
★ Must-know
Emotions arise through the interplay of bodily responses, interpretations of a situation, and information such as predictions shaped by past experience and context. - Barrett, 2017
Emotions can influence attention, memory, decision making, cognition, and intrinsic motivation; they can also interfere with learning by occupying attention or working-memory capacity.
Pekrun’s taxonomy classifies achievement emotions by object focus, emotional valence, and activation.
Further detail
Positive activated achievement emotions are associated with greater interest, intrinsic motivation, self-regulation, and learning. - Pekrun, 2017
In a survey of over 20,000 high school students, 40% reported feeling tired at school, 29% stressed, 26% bored, 12% anxious, 23% happy, and 5% excited. - Moeller et al., 2020
Boredom can weaken motivation, effort, information processing, and self-regulated learning; poorer learning can then deepen boredom as students fall further behind. - Pekrun et al., 2017
★ Must-know
Academic anxiety includes (Cassady, 2010):
Anxiety can contribute to poor school performance, and poor performance can increase anxiety, creating a vicious cycle.
Across preparation, performance, and reflection, anxiety can disrupt attention and study tactics, block retrieval of learned material, and foster beliefs of incapability, lack of control, and ineffective future goals. - Zeidner & Matthews, 2011
Further detail
📌 Academic anxiety has a trait component that learners bring to different situations and a state component triggered by a particular situation’s threat or self-doubt. - Covington, 1992
📌 Anxiety has a cognitive component of worry and negative thoughts and an affective component of physiological and emotional reactions such as a racing heartbeat or fear.
Students can use problem-focused strategies such as planning a study schedule, borrowing good notes, or finding a protected study place, and emotion-focused strategies such as relaxation or describing feelings to a friend. - Zeidner & Matthews, 2011
Avoidance strategies may reduce anxiety in the short term but can increase it in the long term.
Teachers can reduce test anxiety by: clarifying instructions, avoiding unnecessary time pressure, reducing the stakes of major tests, offering alternatives to written tests, teaching self-regulation strategies before, during, and after tests
Preparation → performance → reflection.
★ Must-know
📌 Motivation to learn involves the quality of mental effort and active study strategies, not merely wanting to learn or persisting with repetitive study.
📌 Teachers’ immediate goal is productive engagement with classwork, while their longer-term goal is enduring motivation grounded in students’ interests and personal agency.
Further detail
📌 Rewards may undermine intrinsic motivation when students are already interested in an activity.
The building blocks of motivation to learn are:
Students’ motivation to learn is supported by five questions: why learning matters; whether school is enjoyable, important, useful, and relevant; whether learning will be enjoyable; whether success seems achievable; and whether the student belongs in the classroom.
Jere Brophy (2008) argued that powerful ideas enrich students’ subjective lives by providing lenses for viewing the world, tools for decision-making, and ways to appreciate beauty in words and images.
Examples of real-world problems include:
Teachers can connect learning to students’ self-interests and communities by asking how a task benefits them personally or matters to others and by sharing learning with community members.
Engagement can increase motivation, which can lead to more learning; increased learning can in turn strengthen motivation. - Reeve & Lee, 2014
When the value of material is not obvious, teachers can explain its life connections or let students choose how to explain its importance to them.
★ Must-know
Further detail
📌 Teachers can vary cooperative, competitive, and individualistic task structures and connect abstract or unfamiliar material to something students already know.
📌 Teachers can support autonomy by letting students choose among relevant options, but too many unstructured choices can be counterproductive for learning.
Teachers can make learning enjoyable through appropriately used simulations or games.
Students can choose:
Student interests that can anchor class activities include:
A teacher prompted discussion of other planets’ atmospheres by asking students who believed other planets had people whether people needed oxygen, then pointing out that those planets lack atmospheric oxygen.
★ Must-know
Teachers can build confidence by starting work at students’ current levels and advancing in small steps, while including questions that are both easy and difficult.
Learning goals should be clear, specific, attainable in the near future, and broken into subgoals for long-term projects.
Teachers should emphasize students’ progress relative to their own past performance, give specific feedback and corrections, and point out improvements.
Frequent opportunities to respond through questions, short assignments, or skill demonstrations allow teachers to correct errors before students practice them for too long.
Further detail
📌 Heavy emphasis on grades and competition shifts attention toward performance rather than learning and can especially affect anxious students.
📌 Teachers should teach the learning strategies students need to master material and help them cope with anxiety in learning and testing.
Academic ability is improvable and task-specific, so difficulty in algebra does not necessarily imply difficulty in geometry.
Creating a finished product can increase students’ persistence and focus by making the endpoint visible.
Teachers should model problem solving by showing that several approaches may be needed and that learning is not always smooth or error-free.
Teachers can support learning by modeling their own interest and explaining how they handle difficult learning tasks.
★ Must-know
📌 Belonging-supportive teaching respects each student’s identity, affirms capacity through high expectations and support, and recognizes student agency and contributions. - Kaleen Healey and Chloe Stroman, 2021
Students’ motivation and needs develop within sociocultural contexts shaped by differences in language, culture, economic privilege, personality, knowledge, experience, and social identity. - Nolen, 2020
Family partnership strategies include: understanding family goals, connecting student and family interests to goals, tracking progress, building confidence, showing learning’s value, providing skill-building resources, celebrating learning
Further detail
Teachers can promote inclusion by challenging exclusionary practices and norms, expanding equitable access to accelerated learning, and eliminating inequitable exclusions such as disciplinary sanctions. - Kaleen Healey and Chloe Stroman, 2021
Culturally relevant resources and pedagogy can counter stereotypes and create cultural continuity by drawing on students’ experiences, collaboration, exploration, and communal goals. - Kaleen Healey and Chloe Stroman, 2021
Teachers can support belonging through system-level policies that respect every student, distribute resources and information equitably, and involve students in system-level decisions. - Kaleen Healey and Chloe Stroman, 2021
Mrs. Smith’s flexible reading choices let Saira Matthews choose books by Black authors, strengthening her interest, reading competence, cultural connection, and motivation to write for pleasure. - Gray et al., 2018
Teachers can learn family goals through informal conversations or questionnaires and collaborate with families on plans for skills to develop at school and at home.
Teachers can connect lessons to family interests by inviting a family member to share a skill or hobby and identifying family favorites such as foods, music, sports, activities, or recipes.
Progress charts or goal cards and caregiver feedback can help families track progress and assess how well teachers support children.
Families can build confidence by avoiding sibling comparisons and highlighting strong aspects of homework alongside one area for improvement.
Families can demonstrate learning’s value by sharing how they use mathematics or writing at work and identifying useful skills such as tracking household spending, writing service letters, or researching vacation destinations.
Teachers can build families’ skills and confidence by sharing study strategies and involving older students in a homework hotline for younger students.
Families can celebrate learning by visiting student-created unit museums and portfolios or viewing mini-exhibits in community locations.
★ Must-know
Teachers can make required or outdated materials more engaging by connecting learning objectives to students’ interests, experiences, and lives.
Student choice, varied teaching strategies, and student-centered activities can support engagement and meet learners’ different needs.
Building relationships by learning students’ interests, speaking with them, and treating them as individuals can support trust, motivation, and learning.
Classroom organization is the basic task of gaining and maintaining student cooperation in classroom activities. - Doyle, 2006
Further detail
Teachers can adapt difficult content by breaking lessons into smaller increments, reteaching, using group projects, or adding accessible texts and activities.
Teachers can use available resources creatively, including community resources, materials from home, colleagues’ ideas, and cooperative workbook activities.
Active participation, guided discovery, and discussion of students’ prior knowledge can make workbook practice more meaningful than using drill and practice as the primary source of learning.
Classrooms have six distinctive features: (Doyle, 2006):
Classroom organization has a large impact on student achievement and social competence, while managerial difficulties can contribute to teacher burnout. - Marzano & Marzano, 2003
Classroom management must adapt to students’ developmental stages, from directly teaching early elementary pupils rules and procedures to helping high school students manage themselves. - Emmer & Evertson, 2017
★ Must-know
Participation structures determine who can speak, what they can discuss, when and to whom they can speak, and for how long. - Cazden, 2001
Caring, supportive teacher–student and peer relationships promote cooperation, which supports learning and students’ sense of self-efficacy.
A classroom management system should help students develop self-management rather than focus only on compliance with rules. - Evertson & Weinstein, 2006
Efforts to motivate students can prevent discipline problems because students engaged in learning are less likely to clash with teachers or classmates at the same time.
Emmer and Evertson's classroom-management research found that teachers who applied principles developed from observations of effective classrooms had fewer problems, while students spent more time learning, less time disrupting, and achieved more. - Emmer & Evertson, 2017
Further detail
Students’ home participation rules may differ from school expectations, so teachers should make classroom participation expectations clear and teach important participation behaviors when needed.
A typical high school class with 126 mandated hours may provide about 119 hours available for learning after absences and interruptions, and about 96 hours of instructional time after a further 20% reduction for other activities.
About 80% of instructional time is estimated to be engaged time, and about 80% of engaged time to be academic learning time, leaving approximately 62 hours of academic learning time from 126 mandated hours.
Students develop self-control by: (Bear, 2005): making choices and accepting consequences, setting goals and priorities, managing time, collaborating to learn, mediating disputes and making peace, developing trusting relationships with teachers and classmates
Teaching emotional self-regulation skills, such as anger management, early in the school year was associated with better teacher relationships and less conflict by year’s end among ethnic minority students in the Netherlands. - de Jong et al., 2018
Students may become disruptive when assigned work is too difficult or when lessons are so easy that they become bored.
Access opens learning, time sustains it, relationships support it, and self-management makes it lasting.
★ Must-know
Effective rules and procedures are (Skiba et al., 2016):
In-person classroom routines can address six areas (Romano & Weinstein, 2019):
Further detail
Classroom rules should be positive and observable, and a few general rules that cover many situations are preferable to an exhaustive list of dos and don'ts.
The four suggested elementary classroom rules are (Evertson and Emmer, 2017):
The five suggested secondary classroom rules are (Emmer and Evertson, 2017):
In a study of 34 middle school classrooms, explicit rules about respecting others predicted the number of students who participated in class discussion. - Lindsay Matsumura and her colleagues, 2008
A response that supports social and emotional development 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
Routines describe how activities happen; rules specify which behaviors are expected or forbidden.
★ Must-know
Further detail
Videoconferencing expectations include:
Video discussion norms include:
Remote teachers can build community through: welcome letters, opportunities to share interests, purposeful breakout groups, small-group work contracts, use of students' real names, contact information for students and caregivers
Remote teachers should: make themselves available through virtual office hours, participate in discussion threads, check in on students, communicate selectively, set clear limits on their availability
Remote teachers should teach students to: cite sources, use their own words or mark quotations, recognize that online plagiarism can be detected, identify examples of plagiarism
Remote teachers can address time-management problems by setting assignment deadlines and interim deadlines and using a class calendar with automatic reminders when possible.
🔄 At the first online session: tour the virtual classroom, show where students can find schedules and assignments, establish and post expectations, record the tour for later review
★ Must-know
📌 Horizontal rows support independent seatwork and presentations, focus attention on the presenter, simplify housekeeping, and allow pair work, but they are poor for large-group discussion.
📌 Clusters of four support interaction, peer help, sharing materials, and group tasks, while circles are especially useful for discussion; both arrangements are poor for whole-group presentations and may make management harder.
Further detail
Front seating appears to increase participation and learning for students already predisposed to speak, while back seating can make participation harder and daydreaming easier. - Blume et al., 2019
A fishbowl or stack formation can support demonstrations, brainstorming, and group cohesion, but should be used only briefly because it is uncomfortable and may lead to discipline problems.
Changes to interest areas have been associated with greater participation in science activities and use of manipulative materials, while changes to a library corner increased involvement in literature activities. - Carol Weinstein, 1977
Personal territories and interest areas can be combined by placing students' desks centrally and interest areas around the room's perimeter, allowing flexibility for large- and small-group activities.
Rows focus attention on a presenter; clusters and circles support student interaction.
| Orientation | Focus | Standard |
|---|---|---|
| Mastery-approach | Learning and understanding | Self-improvement and progress |
| Mastery-avoidance | Avoiding misunderstanding | Personal best or past performance |
| Performance-approach | Demonstrating superiority | Beating others or being best |
| Performance-avoidance | Avoiding appearing incompetent | Avoiding the worst result |
| Dimension | Fixed mindset | Growth mindset |
|---|---|---|
| Ability | Stable, uncontrollable, set | Unstable, controllable, improvable |
| Typical goals | Avoid looking incompetent | Moderately difficult goals |
| Learning focus | Protect image of ability | Processes and strategies |
Take a 10-question practice quiz on Strategies to Motivate Learning, with every answer explained.
1. A student has completed 30% of a project goal. Which feedback is most likely to support the student’s self-efficacy and perseverance?
2. In a class project, Maya believes she can succeed only if her classmates succeed too. Which goal structure describes her belief?
Memorize the key concepts of Strategies to Motivate Learning with 10 flashcards.
What does progress-focused feedback enhance, according to Bandura, 1997?
Self-efficacy and perseverance.
What reasons and standards define goal orientations?
Reasons for pursuing goals and standards for evaluating progress.
Which source identifies mastery and performance goal orientations?
Urdan & Kaplan, 2020.
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