Achievement Goal Theory

    As a teacher, student achievement is extremely important. Achievement is essentially a teacher’s entire goal! We not only want our students to succeed but we want them to understand the subject matter at hand and achieve their personal goals. There are two different types of achievement goal theories. (Anderman, 2012; Eccles & Roeser, 2010,2011) The first theory is the Incremental Theory. What this theory states is that intelligence is very malleable, meaning that a person’s intelligence is very easily influenced and can become greater or decrease with that influence. A student with this type of intelligence outlook is one who would tackle new challenges and push themselves to do their best work. The second theory is the entity theory, where intelligence is fixed. In the entity theory a student’s intelligence eventually caps off at a certain point and cannot be increased. A student with this type of outlook on their intelligence wouldn’t chose to try new things and tackle new challenges. This student believes that if he or she is not good at it, they will never be good at it and therefore never try. Students with these different theories lead to different learning goals which then impact their behavior. For example if two students were in a French class and one student was incremental and the other was an entity, they would not tackle an assignment the same way. If the assignment was to conjugate five regular verbs, the incremental theory student would try his or her best at every verb to conjugate it correctly even if he or she was not necessarily good at conjugations. On the other hand the entity theory student would give up after failing one time or may not even try all together. It is not that he or she is bad or cannot conjugate, it is the fact that he or she does not think that they will succeed therefore they should not try.

    In a classroom it is important for teachers to help their students succeed and achieve their goals. To do this however, is not an easy task. In my future classroom I want to promote Incremental intelligence and try to steer students away from having and entity theory of intelligence. I can do this by encouraging my students to continuously improve and challenge themselves. For example, instead of rewarding students who recieve an A or a perfect score on a test, I could reward those who improve from the previous test or quiz that they have taken. This strategy allows me to show the importance of improvement rather than just being great at the subject matter. I could also give students the opportunity to choose different types of ideas for certain projects. What this does is it allows students to challenge themselves and take risks. (Standard 1.3)