Where does achievement goals collide?

Nicholls proposed that achievement behaviour turns on how a person judges their own competence, and that competence can be construed in two ways. When the task itself is the reference, competence means learning or improving, and gains in mastery count for their own sake; Nicholls called this state task involvement. When other people are the reference, competence means doing better than they do with equal or less effort; he called this ego involvement. The distinction concerns the standard by which competence is judged, not the difficulty of the target a person sets, which is the subject of the goal-setting page. Nicholls tied ego involvement to a mature conception of ability as fixed capacity, and task involvement to a less differentiated conception, and argued that the two states carry different patterns of effort, task choice, and performance.[1]

Unit

A person's basis for judging their own competence

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Motivational Orientation Scales, and later task and ego goal-orientation questionnaires

Dweck and Leggett argued that a person's implicit theory of intelligence sets the goal they pursue in achievement settings. Those who believe ability is fixed tend to adopt performance goals, seeking favourable judgements of their competence and trying to avoid unfavourable ones; those who believe ability can grow tend to adopt learning goals, seeking to increase competence itself. The split maps closely onto Nicholls's ego and task involvement, but Dweck placed its cause in a belief about the nature of ability rather than in a momentary state of involvement. In her account the same performance goal that looks adaptive under high confidence turns into a helpless pattern under low confidence, while a learning goal produces mastery-oriented striving in either case. The belief itself has its own page at mindset; here the construct is the goal that belief produces.[2]

Unit

The goal a person's theory of ability leads them to pursue

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Implicit-theory measures paired with learning- and performance-goal items

Elliot argued that the mastery and performance distinction had absorbed a second distinction it should have kept apart: whether a goal drives a person toward success or away from failure. Elliot and Church first split performance goals into a performance-approach goal, aimed at demonstrating competence, and a performance-avoidance goal, aimed at not appearing incompetent, and showed the two had opposite ties to intrinsic motivation and to grades. Elliot and McGregor then crossed the mastery and performance dimension with the approach and avoidance dimension to yield four goals: mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance. The framework re-partitioned the older two-way construct into four, and the mastery-avoidance cell was genuinely new, naming the goal of not falling short of one's own standard. Competence is still defined by the standard against which it is judged, but valence has become a separate axis of the same construct.[3][4]

Unit

One of four goals, by competence standard and by valence

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

The 2x2 Achievement Goal Questionnaire, twelve items across four goals

Elliot, Murayama, and Pekrun re-cut the space again, replacing the single mastery pole with two standards of competence while keeping the approach and avoidance valence. Competence can be defined against the task itself (a task goal, doing the task correctly), against one's own past or potential (a self goal, doing better than before), or against other people (an other goal, doing better than peers). Crossed with approach and avoidance, that yields six goals rather than four, separating the task-based and self-based standards that the earlier mastery category had merged into one. The model returns, in part, to Nicholls's original question of what counts as the standard for competence, now with more cells. Each re-partition kept the phrase achievement goal while changing what the goal is measured against.[5]

Unit

One of six goals, by competence standard and by valence

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

The 3x2 Achievement Goal Questionnaire, eighteen items across six goals