Mothers' beliefs about the role of ability and effort in school learning.

Abstract

We studied the achievement goals of mothers in relation to their interpretation of school success, preferences for certain types of school feedback, task choices, causal attributions, and valuing of certain personal characteristics in their children. Over 500 mothers of children in kindergarten through fifth grade were surveyed. Mothers' preferences for mastery versus performance-based achievement goals were differentiated in terms of the priority mothers gave to the demonstration of effort versus high performance as desired student outcomes. The findings showed that mothers' views about the nature of learning in schools can be differentiated according to their achievement goal emphasis. Mastery and performance goals involved different beliefs about how learning occurs, how it is fostered, how it is evidenced, and how it should be evaluated. The findings suggest that children of mothers with different achievement goals may be encouraged to pursue different types of achievement activities, may be evaluated on different aspects of their behavior, and may experience different types of expectations. Moreover, the findings suggest that a performance goal priority may have especially negative consequences for those children who have doubts about their ability or who do not compare favorably with others.Recent analyses of achievement motivation have focused on the goal-directed nature of behavior and have suggested that achievement goals serve to organize a range of achievement-related beliefs and guide subsequent decision-making and behavior (

Achievement goals in the classroom: Students' learning strategies and motivation processes.

“…On 5-point scales (1 = not likely at all; 5 = very likely), students were asked to indicate the likelihood of their choosing two types of projects for that class. The items adapted from Elliott and Dweck's (1988; see also Ames & Archer, 1987) items were (a) "a project where you can learn a lot of new things but will also have some difficulty and make many mistakes" and (b) "a project that would involve a minimum of struggle or confusion and you would probably do very well." The items were conceptually similar, and students' responses to the two items were highly correlated (r = -.61, p < .001).…”

“…Even students in the same classroom may differ in the degree to which they focus on certain cues, as well as how they interpret them (Brattesani, Weinstein, & Marshall, 1984;Ryan & Grolnick, 1986). These individual differences may result from home influences (Ames & Archer, 1987;Parsons, Adler, & Kaczala, 1982), prior experiences (Stipek & Hoffman, 1980), or differential treatment by teachers (Marshall & Weinstein, 1986;R. S. Weinstein & Middlestadt, 1979).…”

“…Because the conceptual relations among task, learning, and mastery goals and among ego, performance, and ability goals are convergent, these perspectives have been integrated and are hereafter identified as mastery and performance goals, respectively (cf. Ames & Archer, 1987).…”

The Early Grade Reading Assessment: Applications and Interventions to Improve Basic Literacy

“…Most families want their children to be successful in school, and ample evidence documents that parental involvement in school is associated with positive school outcomes (Ames & Archer, 1987;Grolnick et al, 1997;Hill & Craft, 2003;Luster & McAdoo, 1996). Few studies in developing countries have addressed this issue, however.…”

Self-determined motivation, achievement goals and anxiety of economic and business students in Indonesia

“…In general, research has identified two differentiated goals with mastery and performance goals (Dweck, 1986;Dweck and Leggett, 1988;Elliot and Dweck, 1988) or mastery and performance goals (Ames and Archer, 1987;Harackiewicz and Elliot, 1993) or task-involvement and ego-involvement goals (Nicholls, 1984). Mastery and performance goal orientation have different effects on performance, motivation, and affect.…”