college students during their introductory Chemistry course, the entry course
for the pre-med curriculum. Thus it was a highly important course for most
students, and it was a difficult one, with the average exam grade equaling a
C+. Grant and Dweck found that the more that students held learning goals,
the more they reported engaging in deep processing of course material (e.g.,
outlining the material, relating different concepts to each other, attempting
to integrate the material across units). The tendency to engage in deep proc-
essing was predictive of higher course grades, and this tendency mediated the
positive relation between learning goals and course grades.
Do learning goals confer benefits mainly on learning tasks, or are these
benefits apparent on tasks that tap existing intellectual abilities? Mueller and
Dweck (1998) looked at the impact of students’ goal on their performance on
the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Task (Raven, Styles, & Raven, 1998), often
considered to be a nonverbal IQ test. In this study, late grade-school students
succeeded on the first set of moderately difficult problems and then, through
the type of praise they were given, were oriented toward learning goals or per-
formance goals. They then encountered much more difficult problems. How
did they fare?
Those oriented toward learning goals not only performed better on the dif-
ficult problems, but carried over their benefit to a third set of problems (i.e.,
equivalent in difficulty to the first set), doing significantly better than the per-
formance goal-oriented students on the third set as well. In fact, those with
performance goals, after encountering difficulty, performed worse on the
third set than they had on the first.
These findings were replicated across a series of studies using diverse pop-
ulations, and show how, through goal manipulations, we can take children of
equal intellectual ability and make them look quite different on tests of intel-
lectual ability.
MOTIVATIONAL EFFECTS ON ACADEMIC
PERFORMANCE
In two studies, students making the often-difficult transition to junior high
school were followed (Dweck & Sorich, 1999; Henderson & Dweck, 1990). In
these studies, we measured their theories about their intelligence and their aca-
demic (learning or performance) goals at the beginning of seventh grade and
then tracked the grades they received. In both studies, the motivational vari-
ables were significant predictors, over and above prior achievement, of the
grades students earned. For example, in the Dweck and Sorich (1999) study,
students with an incremental theory earned steadily increasing math grades
over seventh and eighth grades, while those with an entity theory earned
44 DWECK, MANGELS, GOOD