Dweck, C.S. Motivational processes affecting learning. American Psychologist, 1986, 41, 1040-1048

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The focus of this paper is on the motivational processes that affect cognitive tasks. In the past 15 years, research has shifted to how a child construes a situation and reacts to it.

Achievement motivation involves learning goals (seek to increase competence or mastery) and performance goals (seek favorable judgements and avoid negative judgements). Adaptive motivation patterns support the develop of challenging achievement goals. Adpative children seek challenging tasks and persists them. Maladaptive build anxiety over the task, avoid challenging tasks, and give up easily.

Children who believe intelligence is fixed develop performance goals, and children who think intelligence is malleable choose learning goals. Performance goals require mastery before attempt (in order to get a good appraisal) so they aren't attempted often. Children with low personal assessments will choose easy activities. With learning goals children are willing to risk perceptions of ignorance in order to acquire skills or knowledge.

Children with performance goals attribute failure to their own ability. Their satisfaction comes from perception of displayed ability, versus a learning goal child who is satisfied with the effort. Barriers are more of a hinderance because they call into question the child's ability.

Relation of Ablity and Motiviation
Intestingly, measures of competence don't predict confidence of future attainment, especially true with bright girls. Bright girls preferred tasks they were good at, and bright boys preferred tasks they had to master. Girls also ascribed to the "trait" view of intelligence.

Does Motivational Pattern Predict Ability Over Time?
It appears that grade school doesn't provide enough potential for failure, so these tendencies don't appear until later.

Sex Differences in Math Achievement
Sex differences in movitation are biggest among the best students. Girls avoided uncertain, ambigious material more often. In math one experiences failure more often at early stages.

Experiences tha Foster Adaptaive Patterns
Most eductional practice today tries to create high confidence performers via praise. However, in the lab this can produce problems when the reinforcement is stopped. The second awareness was in teacher expectancy effects.

The results show that continued success on easy tasks does not produce stable confidence, challenge seeking, and persistance. Retraining attribution of error (from ability to effort) can help.