Performance Goals and Task Performance

Abstract

Abstract. Recent years have seen an increased interest in understanding how high-stakes evaluative contexts, which are pervasive in the academic arena, may influence crucial outcomes such as performance and achievement. The salience of grades, as well as the importance to distinguish oneself in the eyes of teachers to have access to valued diplomas, encourages the adoption of performance-approach goals (i.e., the desire to outperform others). Consistent with literature documenting the cognitive costs of high-pressure situations, recent findings have highlighted the detrimental consequences of performance-approach goals on availability of working memory resources, pointing at distraction as the cause of this phenomenon. We review and discuss this result in the light of the achievement goal literature. We then present both methodological and theoretical arguments to clarify and reconcile the apparent contradictions between this emerging evidence and the well-documented positive impact of performance-approach goal pursuit on achievement in the classroom. Throughout, we highlight how the study of performance-approach goal-related interference has the potential to enrich our understanding of how evaluative contexts do generate distraction.