directed attention, disrupted cognitive resources, and decreased perform-
ance. However, encouraging stereotyped individuals to view intelligence as
malleable and to adopt learning goals rather than performance goals, may
begin to reduce the race and gender gaps in school achievement and stan-
dardized test performance.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, we have demonstrated the important effects that motivation
can have on attentional and cognitive processes, on the effective use of cogni-
tive strategies, and on intellectual performance, both on laboratory tasks and
in educational environments. These effects are apparent even across students
with equivalent cognitive skills. The findings we have presented, like many of
the findings now emerging from cognitive neuroscience (Ochsner & Lie-
berman, 2001), speak to the ways in which motivation, emotion, and cogni-
tion work together to produce intellectual performance and to the idea that
studying cognition in isolation from its sister processes cannot yield a full or
valid picture of the workings of the mind.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research reported in this chapter was supported in part by grants from
the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, the Na-
tional Institutes of Health, the W. T. Grant Foundation, and the Spencer
Foundation.
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