2013 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.This study extended the theory of the undermining effect on motivation to a learning context and examined the interaction with individual goals for learning. The undermining effect suggests that the removal of external rewards can decrease levels of internal motivation. Students possessing a desire to improve, or learning goal individuals, often appear to be more internally motivated to engage in challenging tasks, whereas, performance goal individuals tend to engage in tasks that confirm their intelligence. Students were assigned to either a reward or non-reward condition and completed a word-learning task. They were allowed to engage in studying the words during a free period. An undermining effect was found: A greater amount of time was spent studying by individuals in the non-reward group, no matter the personal goals for learning. Learning goal subjects were hypothesized to show little difference in study time between groups, whereas performance goal subjects were predicted to be more sensitive to motivational undermining and therefore engage in the task more in the non-reward group; however, the interaction between undermining and goal orientation was not significant and these hypotheses were not supported. These results have significant implications for verifying the impact of motivation on learning behaviors and provide support for the encouragement of intrinsic motivation and contribute to the current literature exploring the cause for differences in performance success among students
