Goal orientation, or achievement orientation, is an "individual disposition towards developing or validating one's ability in achievement settings". In general, an individual can be said to be mastery or performance oriented, based on whether one's goal is to develop one's ability or to demonstrate one's ability, respectively. A mastery orientation is also sometimes referred to as a learning orientation.

Goal orientation refers to how an individual interprets and reacts to tasks, resulting in different patterns of cognition, affect and behavior. Developed within a social-cognitive framework, the orientation goal theory proposes that students' motivation and achievement-related behaviors can be understood by considering the reasons or purposes they adopt while engaged in academic work. The focus is on how students think about themselves, their tasks, and their performance. Goal orientations have been shown to be associated with individuals' academic achievement, adjustment, and well-being.

Research has examined goal orientation as a motivation variable that is useful for recruitment, climate and culture, performance appraisal, and choice. It has also been used to predict sales performance, adaptive performance, goal setting, learning and adaptive behaviors in training, and leadership.

Research on achievement motivation can be traced back to the 1940s following the seminal work of David McClelland and colleagues who established the link between achievement and motivations (see need for achievement). Students' goal orientations were shown to be predictive of academic performance. Specifically, students with high goal orientation tended to value competence, expect success and seek challenges, while students with low achievement motivation tended to expect failure and avoid challenges.

In an effort to better understand the mechanisms underlying achievement, personality and social psychology researchers expanded McClelland's work by examining how cognitive representations shape social experiences. Personality researchers have explored aspects of goal motivation as an aspect of identity, whereas social psychologists have focused on the thought patterns that arise across various contexts.

Conceptualizations of goal orientation were proposed in the 1970s by educational psychologist Eison. Eison argued that students who attended college as an opportunity to acquire new skills and knowledge possessed a mastery orientation (which he referred to as learning orientation), while students who attended college to exclusively obtain high grades possessed a grade orientation. Eison originally believed that these two orientations were two ends of the same continuum and developed the Learning Orientation-Grade Orientation Scale to measure it.

Meanwhile, Nicholls was developing a related theory that goal motivation would lead grade school children to set high task-related goals. Nicholls found that some high-ability children would use maladaptive strategies when they encountered difficult tasks, which led to eventual feelings of helplessness. By contrast, others would use more productive coping strategies to avoid helplessness. Nicholls later conceptualized these differences as two types of achievement goals: task involvement, where individuals seek to develop their competence relative to their abilities, and ego involvement, where individuals seek to develop their competence relative to the abilities of others.

Nicholls' early work set the stage for Carol Dweck's work.