What is the difference between mastery goals and performance goals?

Goal orientation theory in educational psychology distinguishes two ways learners define success on a task. A mastery (or learning) goal orientation defines success against the learner's own progress — gaining competence, understanding, and skill in the task for its own sake. A performance goal orientation defines success against an external, comparative standard — demonstrating competence relative to others, or avoiding a poor judgement of one's ability — commonly evidenced through grades, rankings, or other externally validated outcomes.

Applying this distinction, among the options offered the one that ties mastery goals to improving one's own skills and understanding of a task, and ties performance goals to achieving a high grade or receiving external rewards, comes closest to this framework: mastery goals are judged against the learner's own progress, while performance goals are judged by an externally validated outcome such as a grade or reward.

The remaining options build the same two labels around different, non-standard axes:

• One reading pairs mastery goals with avoiding failure and performance goals with gaining approval and recognition from others — this substitutes an avoidance-versus-recognition axis for the competence-versus-external-validation axis that defines the two goal types.

• One reading pairs mastery goals with gaining approval from others and performance goals with avoiding failure. Avoiding failure is itself a recognised, narrower way of framing a performance goal, but gaining approval from others is misassigned here — that externally judged, approval-seeking standard belongs on the performance-goal side of the distinction, not the mastery-goal side.

• One reading pairs mastery goals with achieving a performance level while competing with others and performance goals with improving one's own skills and understanding — this reverses which goal type is tied to competition-based standards and which is tied to skill-development standards.

So the best-supported characterisation of the mastery-performance goal distinction, among the options offered, is the one built on the internal-progress-versus-external-validation axis — consistent with the well-established framework of achievement goal theory (Ames, 1992; Dweck, 1986), where a performance goal is judged externally (through grades, rewards, or comparison with others) rather than through the learner's own progress — and this option is confirmed by the CBSE CTET Paper II official answer key.