To suggest that teachers can boost the achievement of their students by doing one relatively simple thing – emphasizing learning – might seem like obvious and condescending advice.

But research shows that plenty of teachers actually don’t focus on learning. Instead, they encourage their students to compete with one another for good grades, possibly unaware of the evidence that has shown it to be a bad educational strategy.

Students don’t come into classrooms as blank slates. They have their own personal goals which can also affect their academic performance. Some students are interested in learning new things and mastering new skills. Some want to demonstrate their superiority over other students and to impress their teachers. Still others aim to hide their weaknesses.

Researchers at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore wondered about the combined effect on achievement of classroom atmosphere and students’ individual goals. Shun Lau and Youyan Nie surveyed 3,943 fifth grade students from 130 classrooms in Singapore. They asked them about their personal goals and motivations. They also asked how they perceived their teachers’ goals and tested their abilities in math.

Like other researchers before them, Lau and Nie found that students tended to perform better on math tests when they were in classrooms where teachers were perceived to emphasize learning and improving. They were also more likely than other students to work hard and not give up, even when school work was difficult.

By contrast, students in classrooms where there was a stronger emphasis on demonstrating competence and competing for high grades, did not perform as well on math tests. They also were less likely to pay attention, participate in group work, and persevere when school work was difficult or boring.

Furthermore, teachers who emphasized competition and performance were particularly unhelpful to students who aimed to hide their academic weaknesses.

The evidence thus continues to mount that students learn best when they are encouraged to… well, learn.

• Summary of “Interplay Between Personal Goals and Classroom Goal Structures in Predicting Student Outcomes: A Multilevel Analysis of Person–Context Interactions” by Shun Lau and Youyan Nie in Journal of Educational Psychology, February 2008, Vol. 100, No. 1, pp 15–29.