Goal orientation
What is it about?
Children should learn to be goal-oriented. Individuals can vary a lot in accomplishing goals, especially study goals. For instance, children can be interested in learning or they can aim to do better than others.
Carol Dweck differentiates between two different types of goal orientations: performance and learning or mastery goals. Entity theorists are performance-oriented and incremental theorists are learning-oriented. Learning-oriented children are interested in achieving growth mindset, acquiring new knowledge, improving themselves and gaining several competencies, while making continuously progress. In contrast, performance-oriented children are rather interested in demonstrating or proving their competence, gaining recognition, comparing themselves with others and aiming good grades by learning hard. These children rather grasp at the society's attention rather than at a growing mindset.
Of course, we always want our children to become learning-oriented and interested in improving themselves, instead of just showing others how great they are (performance-oriented). Therefore, we as parents should try to support our children in achieving a learning interest. But how can we do that?
Carol Dweck differentiates between two different types of goal orientations: performance and learning or mastery goals. Entity theorists are performance-oriented and incremental theorists are learning-oriented. Learning-oriented children are interested in achieving growth mindset, acquiring new knowledge, improving themselves and gaining several competencies, while making continuously progress. In contrast, performance-oriented children are rather interested in demonstrating or proving their competence, gaining recognition, comparing themselves with others and aiming good grades by learning hard. These children rather grasp at the society's attention rather than at a growing mindset.
Of course, we always want our children to become learning-oriented and interested in improving themselves, instead of just showing others how great they are (performance-oriented). Therefore, we as parents should try to support our children in achieving a learning interest. But how can we do that?
Tips: How to apply in everyday life?
Parents should try to minimize strategies that lead to performance goals. TARGET is a concept which describes several tips and practices for educators to support the achievement of mastery goals in their children (Meece, Anderman & Anderman, 2006).
Tasks: One idea is that parents should provide their children various, challenging tasks which seem to be interesting. The difficulty here is to
indicate your child the usefulness of the learning activity. Give the task a great importance and meaning!
Authority: Another advice is that you as a parent should give your child the opportunity to take responsibility for learning. It is important
that your child makes decisions on its own and also sometimes assumes leadership roles.
Recognition: In addition, you should pay attention to give your child incentives and rewards that focus on the individual effort, improvement
over time and accomplishments your child makes.
Grouping: Another tip is to support your child in finding and meeting friends, so that they can create heterogeneous groups that promote peer
collaboration and cooperation. In this way, your child and of course the whole group can learn from one another.
Evaluation: Furthermore, you should give varied, private (individual rather than group evaluation) and efficient evaluation to your child about
his or her improvements. Assess its individual progress and mastery in your child rather than the products.
Timing: In addition, for your child it is meaningful to learn timing! Give your child the opportunities to plan their own schedules and to complete
school assignments at appropriate and optimal rates. Of course your support is necessary at the beginning!
In addition, it is important to represent the idea that achieving particular goals takes time and especially effort and that making mistakes are a normal and healthy part of the learning process.
BUT: Praising ability or intelligence often harms motivation and performance because children become afraid of making mistakes or appearing less smart. The best thing we can do is to teach children to love challenges, see mistakes as opportunities, and enjoy effort.
Tasks: One idea is that parents should provide their children various, challenging tasks which seem to be interesting. The difficulty here is to
indicate your child the usefulness of the learning activity. Give the task a great importance and meaning!
Authority: Another advice is that you as a parent should give your child the opportunity to take responsibility for learning. It is important
that your child makes decisions on its own and also sometimes assumes leadership roles.
Recognition: In addition, you should pay attention to give your child incentives and rewards that focus on the individual effort, improvement
over time and accomplishments your child makes.
Grouping: Another tip is to support your child in finding and meeting friends, so that they can create heterogeneous groups that promote peer
collaboration and cooperation. In this way, your child and of course the whole group can learn from one another.
Evaluation: Furthermore, you should give varied, private (individual rather than group evaluation) and efficient evaluation to your child about
his or her improvements. Assess its individual progress and mastery in your child rather than the products.
Timing: In addition, for your child it is meaningful to learn timing! Give your child the opportunities to plan their own schedules and to complete
school assignments at appropriate and optimal rates. Of course your support is necessary at the beginning!
In addition, it is important to represent the idea that achieving particular goals takes time and especially effort and that making mistakes are a normal and healthy part of the learning process.
BUT: Praising ability or intelligence often harms motivation and performance because children become afraid of making mistakes or appearing less smart. The best thing we can do is to teach children to love challenges, see mistakes as opportunities, and enjoy effort.
Goals
Children as effective learners would rather follow learning or mastery goals rather than performance goals. It is desirable to increase self-regulation in your child by helping them to learn when to emphasize certain goals or goal orientations. Mastery goals cause greater persistence in the child and a more varied and better strategy use. In addition, your child acquires an appropriate help-seeking competency and is more likely to achieve high self-efficacy. Also, it gains real interest and enjoyment in different tasks and is more likely to try new challenging fields. Another impact on your child is that it is able to attribute success to controllable factors such as effort and strategy use. In contrast, performance goals lead to following easy rather than challenging problems and showing less enjoyment and interest in new tasks. Your child tries to avoid challenges and shows a defensive attitude regarding her or his ability. Additionally, your child tends to develop a learned helplessness because it is afraid of failure.
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