Chapter 12: Teaching Pre-Service Teachers About Goal Orientations

In education, one of the most basic problems is moving research into practice. This has been particularly true in the field of educational psychology (Anderman, 2011). Once students become professional teachers there is little support available to reinforce the importance of many principles.

Perhaps one of the areas that is most often de-emphasized is academic motivation. Education students are exposed to numerous motivation-related concepts during teacher education programs; however, once they get out into the “real world” of teaching, many of these concepts may be undermined by existing policies. Indeed, research clearly indicates that, although many well-intentioned instructional practices related to academic motivation are built upon solid empirical research, they are often undermined by larger school-level policies (Maehr & Midgley, 1996).