Performance Goals and Task Performance

Abstract

Abstract. Recent years have seen an increased interest in understanding how high-stakes evaluative contexts, which are pervasive in the academic arena, may influence crucial outcomes such as performance and achievement. The salience of grades, as well as the importance to distinguish oneself in the eyes of teachers to have access to valued diplomas, encourages the adoption of performance-approach goals (i.e., the desire to outperform others). Consistent with literature documenting the cognitive costs of high-pressure situations, recent findings have highlighted the detrimental consequences of performance-approach goals on availability of working memory resources, pointing at distraction as the cause of this phenomenon. We review and discuss this result in the light of the achievement goal literature. We then present both methodological and theoretical arguments to clarify and reconcile the apparent contradictions between this emerging evidence and the well-documented positive impact of performance-approach goal pursuit on achievement in the classroom. Throughout, we highlight how the study of performance-approach goal-related interference has the potential to enrich our understanding of how evaluative contexts do generate distraction.

Achievement Goals: A Social Influence Cycle

“…Mixed findings, on the contrary, emerge from the study of the relation between performance-approach goals and performance. Reviews and meta-analytical results revealed sometimes positive and sometimes weak to nonexistent effects, which also varied as a function of domain-education, work, or sports (Crouzevialle & Butera 2017, Lochbaum & Gottardy 2015, Murayama & Elliot 2012, Payne et al 2007, Van Yperen et al 2014). These meta-analyses are too different to draw any conclusion, but an interesting specification comes from the meta-analysis by Hulleman et al (2010), who coded the phrasing of the items that operationalized achievement goals in the various studies.…”

Motivational Dynamics Underlying Competition: The Opposing Processes Model of Competition and Performance

“…For example, high-stakes situations heighten perceived performance pressure, likely producing distracting concerns and worries about one's competence. These concerns and worries are the source of the adoption of performance-avoidance goals (Brodish & Devine, 2009;Jury et al, 2019; see also Crouzevialle & Butera, 2017 for an alternative perspective). On the other hand, situations designed to downplay the importance of winning would likely facilitate the adoption of performance-approach goals; thus such situations would bring adaptive outcomes.…”