College students experience pressure to obtain academic credentials to gain entry to graduate and professional programs. Ironically, these pressures are most intense among the most talented students, who are likely to attend the most selective and competitive colleges and universities, and have high aspirations. This pressure to succeed creates stress and consequent dysregulation of the stress hormone cortisol, which in turn contributes to both physical and mental illness, such as respiratory illness and depression. The pursuit of academic success can paradoxically interfere with learning, especially in challenging contexts. Many students focus not on acquiring knowledge and learning skills but on obtaining high grades with the minimum work possible. Cheating, which prioritizes grades over learning, is commonplace: In a survey of 1800 college students from state universities, 70% admitted cheating at least once during tests.
According to the self-worth theory of achievement motivation (Covington, 1992), achievement behavior in schools reflects students' attempts to maintain self-esteem by constructing an image of themselves as academically competent. For students whose self-worth is contingent on academic success, investing effort in academics is threatening because failure combined with effort suggests a lack of ability, which diminishes self-worth. Consequently, academically contingent students sacrifice learning and avoid the esteem-threatening implications of failure, by lowering aspirations, creating excuses for failure, avoiding effort, cheating, or psychologically disengaging. The main goal of the project is to investigate whether and when learning orientations (beliefs that intelligence can improve, mastery goals, and double-loop learning goals, i.e., the goal of learning from failure by examining assumptions and strategies) buffer students with contingent self-worth from self-threat in the face of academic difficulty. We hypothesize that learning orientations enhance learning, decreasing stress, vulnerability of self-esteem, and cheating, and improve mental and physical health outcomes, especially for populations at risk (e.g., women in nontraditional fields such as engineering).
A series of laboratory experiments, longitudinal studies, and an intervention study test the hypotheses that 1) students who base their self-worth on academics experience stress in the face of difficult tasks; 2) the belief that intelligence can be improved buffers contingent self-esteem from failure in the absence of practice but not with practice; and 3) double-loop learning goals protect self-esteem, increase learning, and decreases stress and cheating among students with contingent self-worth facing difficulty, better than measured single-loop learning goals or incremental theories. An intervention experiment implements training in double-loop learning goals to see if it decreases negative outcomes (stress, poor performance, physical symptoms, symptoms of depression), in students with contingent self-worth, especially among women in engineering, who are at risk of dropping out of their major, relative to a control group.
