Student Achievement

Motivation occupies much of my thoughts.  I mean motivation as a topic, not my own personal motivation, which is boundless, in case you were wondering.

I find this topic fascinating, because motivation is powerfully linked to classroom formative assessment.  And yet, many teachers’ beliefs about motivation are contrary to the relationship as I understand it to work.  But this post is not about that…

In searching for useful research on motivation, I came across a body of literature on goals; specifically, the difference between learning goals and performance goals, and when each should be used. 

A performance goal is to hit a particular target, such as getting an A in a class, having 70% of students be proficient or advanced on CSAP, or making a certain quota of sales.

A learning goal is when the goal is not the target itself, but to become better at doing something.  The target still exists, but is not the focus of activity.  Performance is a by-product of the learning.

To measure how effective different goals are, participants in research studies have been given different types of instructions:

• Do your best!
• Learn as much as you can about getting better at this (whatever it is)
• Try to meet a particular target

Turns out that when people already know how to do whatever it is that’s being measured, a performance goal gets the highest performance.  But when the task is more complex, and when people don’t already know how to do it, then trying to meet a performance goals elicits lower performance than just asking people to do their best.  And telling people to focus on learning how to do the task actually elicits the highest performance.

I find this fascinating.  I have spent untold hours planning, writing, or discussing School Improvement Plans, some of them very long indeed.  I figured out a long time ago that long plans were death to actual improvement, and was glad to find research (documented by Doug Reeves and Mike Schmoker; I confess I haven’t read any of it myself) that the FORMAT of the plan is NEGATIVELY correlated with student achievement.  The goals part of School Improvement Plans was particularly problematic, and now I am ecstatic to find that there’s really good evidence that the most effective thing you can do to raise performance is to focus on learning! 

That doesn’t mean that the target is not important.  But I think it does mean that we shouldn’t spend time thinking about the target.  Instead, we should work on targets set by the school board (see the post from earlier this evening on our academic performance), and frame those in terms of what we need to learn how to do.

Here’s the excerpt I used with the principals, and hope to use with other groups, to talk about this idea.  The principals certainly had a very rich discussion prompted by reading it.

And in case you don’t remember Schmoker on the topic of school improvement planning, here he is…  And I would say that I would reframe the part about what teachers need to do to include a focus on a learning goal.  I don’t think teachers should be setting goals, if those goals are performance targets.  I think they should be focused on getting better at what they do.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Student Achievement and tagged classroom formative assessment, goals, motivation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.