Why does it matter what students believe about their ability?
How we harness the power of performance orientation
We have previously written about why motivation is important in assessment and, conversely, how assessment plays a role in motivation. In this post, we will discuss how students’ self beliefs affect their motivation to study towards an assessment.
Our students hold two beliefs about attainment in our subject, even if we have never assessed them formally. These beliefs affect their proclivity to study and therefore are worthy of our attention.
Where do I fit?
Firstly, they hold some idea of how good they are at our subject, relative to their peers.
How ‘good’ do they want to be? It isn’t particularly helpful to think of all students as wanting to be ranked top in their class, not least because it simply isn’t worthwhile to have this kind of aspiration given the time costs of trying to achieve it. Instead, they tend to review whether they are “where they want to be”, where this is shaped by two desires: avoiding last place and maintaining their accustomed position in the social hierarchy. Maintaining our accustomed position means that a student who is used to being place somewhere around position 10 out of 30 in a class is likely to feel satisfied with a grade they receive, provided it ranks them around that position again.
What can I do about it?
As well as a belief about how good they are at our subject, students hold some beliefs about whether working hard in our subject is likely to enable them to improve their attainment, relative to their peers, and get them where they want to be.
This is sometimes known as the productivity of their effort: how much can each extra hour of study help them improve their relative class position? A student who believes they can significantly improve their position in the class by studying for an extra 30 minutes each night believes they have a strong ability to progress. By contrast, the student who thinks it isn’t worth revising because they will do badly whatever happens believes they have a weak ability to progress.
So, motivation is not just influenced by a student’s definition of success – their desire to occupy a particular place in the social hierarchy of attainment – but also by whether changing this is within their control and worth the effort.
How do these beliefs form?
Students form the above beliefs through experience. They draw upon information such as whether they appear to understand what is being taught as well as others in the class, the feedback they get from teachers, and their past success in assessments. They also draw conclusions about how worthwhile their efforts have been in the past.
The accuracy of these attributions is important. If students experience success and link this to productive study behaviours, these behaviours will be reinforced, leading to more success. However, if students attribute their performance in assessments to factors outside of their control, such as their ‘natural ability’ in the subject or the difficulty of the assessment, their belief in the productivity of their effort will be diminished.
How can teachers harness these beliefs?
This ‘performance orientation’ is not necessarily optimal. There is evidence to suggest that a ‘mastery orientation’ – whereby a student is motivated to master the subject rather than outperform their peers – leads to more success in the long term.
However, very few students judge themselves in relation to curriculum mastery when it comes to being tested, as much as we might like them to. Teachers may think of ‘the curriculum as the progression model’, but students generally don’t have this framework in mind. When a student says they are ‘no good at maths’, they mean ‘I am no good at maths in relation to those I compare myself against’, not in relation to the subject’s architecture and content. Even when teachers provide information to students that attempts to position them in relation to the curriculum, like diagnostic feedback, students will often interpret this not as information about how much of the curriculum they have mastered but as a signal of their rank position.
Recent research suggests that the optimal approach may be for students to adopt a mastery orientation during their learning, focusing on developing a deep understanding of the content, while shifting to a performance orientation when tested.1 In this model, students strive to improve and master the material in preparation but channel their natural desire for comparison to perform well during assessments. This dual approach acknowledges and leverages students’ innate tendency to compare themselves to others rather than attempting to suppress it entirely.
By working with, rather than against, these tendencies, teachers may find it more feasible to promote both sustained learning effort and productive test performance, creating a balanced and realistic goal for classroom practice.
Pintrich, P. R. (2000). Multiple goals, multiple pathways: The role of goal orientation in learning and achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(3), 544–555.