This chapter and lecture were extremely illuminating. In my work with elementary students last semester, I witnessed elementary school students doing all those strategies listed to avoid failure. I also recognize the concept of the performance goals, and have seen both in action.
One particular circumstance involved a seventh grade boy who absolutely had the ability to achieve; you could tell by his in-class work. However, when it came to turning in homework, he'd "forget" to do it. The in-class work alone kept him from failing, and he even STATED that as long as he wasn't failing, he wouldn't get in trouble with his parents. He was putting forward, really, a false effort. He achieved 'just enough' to keep himself from failing.
What we, as teachers, have to do, is create a system where this kind of participation is unacceptable - that turning in only partial work will still achieve a passing grade. A way we could do that would be insisting all work has to be turned in before a grade can be determined. That way, the students know they actually have to put forward an effort to succeed - even if it's not their best work.

Motivation

From the lecture and book I learned more about motivation. Motivation is important for helping student become successful in life. I think it is better to have student be intrinsically motivated because they want to learn and do well for themselves. On the other hand, student that are extrinsically motivated do school work for the grade or for the teacher approval. Giving students little rewards, such as pencils, erasers and little toys, can make a student work hard solely so they can get the reward. In these situations the student doesn’t learn the information as well and the information will not stick with them.

I enjoyed learning about self efficacy in this section. Self efficacy is how a person thinks they will perform on a specific task. It is based largely on past successes, self regulation, and mastery goals. Just recently I did a research paper on math anxiety and I found that self efficacy largely tied into it. When a student does poorly on math tests and homework assignments they begin to fear math and be very anxious through out the subject. The student self efficacy tells them they are not good a math and will do poorly again.