My daughter Karen presented a 'best paper' at the NCA Conference in San Francisco and we drove up to watch. Here I am with Karen's advisor Dr. Palenchar of the University of Tennessee and a remarkable young professor.
Here are a few readings for today:
“”The negative social consequences of getting good grades were particularly pronounced for black and Native American students in high-achieving schools with small proportions of students similar to themselves,” said University of Michigan developmental psychologist Thomas Fuller-Rowell, the lead author of the study.”
“How you think about your goals — whether it’s to improve yourself or to do better than others — can affect whether you reach those goals. Different kinds of goals can also have distinct effects on your relationships with people around you, according to the authors of a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.”
“A complex network of brain connections necessary for language comprehension has been mapped in new detail, according to recent research. These newly charted pathways will help scientists understand how language is processed in the brain, and how brain injuries disrupt the system.”
“A brain area known to play a critical role in vision is divided into compartments that respond separately to different colors and orientations, Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered. The findings have important implications for furthering our understanding of perception and attention.”
4 Comments
scoletto · November 22, 2010 at 2:20 pm
I thought that the article “Your View of Personal Goals Can Affect Your Relationships” was interesting, but I wasn’t very surprised at it’s content. I definitely recognize the difference between mastery and performance goals because I encounter them often myself, sometimes even at the same time. I remember when I played soccer in high school I always wanted to better my own performance on the field (mastery goal), but I also found myself being very concerned with my performance in comparison to my team mates (performance goals). But I think it’s necessary to have both types of goals because they feed off of and supplement one another. Without performance goals it may be hard to find external motivation to better oneself. In the end, input from your peers and others is necessary in order to improve on any type of task, but internal motives make the goals more genuine in my opinion.
clwarren · November 23, 2010 at 12:51 pm
I also read the article on how goals can affect your relationships. Most of the time, as bad as it is, I find myself “performance goal” oriented. I think growing up within a private school system where academics are so competitive really bring a negative outlook on what academic achievment really means. I always felt that to get a better grade in the class in meant I had to be better than another person who had a higher grade than me and push them out of their ranking in the class. Another example is how concerned people are with the curve of tests, and if a student screws up that curve for everyone else by getting a 102%…well let’s hope that person doesn’t speak up and say it was them. Teachers, starting from elementary school, need to enforce the idea that all grades are earned by individual efforts and not based on the grades of others. Maybe if I had learned that earlier, I wouldn’t feel so anxious when friends around me do a whole lot better on certain assignments.
natzafis · November 27, 2010 at 7:17 pm
The article concerning how your personal goals can affect your relationships was interesting, but I initially thought that the article would focus more on personal relationships instead of work relationships. In the work environment, the impact of performance and mastery goals is very apparent, especially with jobs that are team-based or jobs where employers reward their top employees with bonuses, which obviously would encourage the development of performance goals to outshine other hard-working coworkers. I think it would have been even more intriguing to read about how personal goals affect intimate relationships with friends, family, and even with significant others. In every setting, mastery goals are more beneficial, not only to the individual aspiring to achieve them, but to the positive growth of those around them. It can be very detrimental to relationships between friends, siblings, and even boyfriends and girlfriends if competing for better grades or positive attention from parents or other peers is simply based upon the desire to upstage than the other person.
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