Goals of learning are thought to be a key factor influencing the level of a student's intrinsic motivation.
This theory is composed of two main components as follows: the individuality and difficulty of the goal, and the effort one needs to fulfill the objectives.
[1] Research in goal theory has identified the following dichotomies: A student is described as task-involved when they are interested in the task for its own qualities.
This deep desire to out-do those around oneself can alter classroom ideologies in each student; some for the better and sometimes for the worse.
Students can feel accomplished when they receive a better grade on the test than everyone else, but that can simply be linked to memorization and not full comprehension.
Klahr argued that although there are large adult-child differences in overall problem-solving performance, even preschoolers have rudimentary forms of strategies such as means-ends analysis that rely on the use of goals.
[9] Thus, expanding the subject selection range and focusing on the process of goal-setting are expected to be the two main tasks in future research direction.