Goals An Approach To Motivation And Achievement Analysis

In Elaine Elliott and Carol Dweck’s article “Goals: An Approach to Motivation and Achievement” they focus on two very contrasting reactions to failure. They go through and give you extreme detail on what their experiment entailed, interesting findings, and what they ended up concluding at the end of the study. Elliott and Dweck’s center of attention in this experiment was to test their hypothesis that different goals set up the observed helpless and mastery-oriented patterns. They suggest that individuals seek two major goals while put in an achievement situation, a time when an individual believes that their capabilities are being evaluated somehow. First, the individuals desire to maintain their good, favorable judgements and steer away …show more content…
The problem consisted of a deck of cards that showed two figures, that all varied in color, form, and the symbol in the center. The child was to determine which one of the cards was named to be the stimulus of the six in each group. However, on the three test problems the experimenters asked the children to vocalize their thoughts. It would give them a look at how children think different problems through.
After several different experiments, they had found some results. They found that the children did indeed the children decided to choose the learning box when the knowledge of performance evaluation was known. Furthermore, the children believed that their abilities in skills were high when the value of performance was highlighted. These kids tried and tried to attempt the problems to come up with the solution, however they did not show any reaction to failure of not finding the …show more content…
A dependent variable is the variable in an experiment that you cannot change, it is solely based on your independent variable, which is what you do change to get your results. The dependent variables in this experiment are the choice of tasks, performance during the difficult tasks, and spontaneous verbalization during difficult times. These are the variables that you would be trying to see the results of, for example you get to see how a child reacts to his/her failure in a difficult task, and how they verbalize their thoughts when put in this kind of position. However, the independent variables are the ages of children that they chose, the types of problems/experiments they made them do, or even just telling them that their performance would be filmed or not. These all have a significant role on the