09/01/2021
Motivation and learning
If you are motivated, you learn better and remember more of what you learned. This sounds like an obvious fact, but our lab showed that the reality is more nuanced. The critical fact is that not all motivations are created equal.
In the literature of achievement goals, for example, people study primarily for two different goals — to master materials and develop their competence, which are called mastery goals, and to perform well in comparison to others, which are called performance goals (Dweck, 1986; Nicholls, 1984). Mastery goals and performance goals represent the same overall quantity of motivation, but they are qualitatively distinct types of motivation. We conducted a series of behavioral experiments to examine how these two different types of motivation influence learning (Murayama & Elliot, 2011).
In the study, participants were engaged in a problem-solving task and received a surprise memory test related to the task. Critically, participants performed the problem-solving task with different goals. Participants in the mastery goal condition were told that the goal was to develop their cognitive ability through the task, whereas those in the performance goal condition were told that their goal was to demonstrate their ability relative to other participants. The participants in the performance goal condition showed better memory performance in an immediate memory test, but when the memory was assessed one week later, participants in the mastery goal condition showed better memory performance. These results indicate that performance goals help short-term learning, whereas mastery goals facilitate long-term learning.😀😀😀