I am becoming familiar with so many of the new terms from Chapter 14.  The case study opens many topics with Ms. Ford the teacher in the situation making the students take their exams home and get them signed by their parents. The chapter says that assessments can motivate students to learn.  I think this is a true statement for a normal high achieving student, but it would seem to me that a student with something like test anxiety would not gain help from it. In my eyes it links straight over to the intrinsic and extrinsic motivators.  Intrinsic coming from within the child's own desire for success through better grades and extrinsic coming from outside stimulus, maybe from the child's desire to avoid punishment from the parents. The chapter labels her statements as threatening because she says she will call the student's parents but we really are not given enough of the back story to label this as threatening.  If she has had these students for a long while and knows that they are capable of doing better then she may be trying to use the performance goal as a motivator towards a mastery goal.  Further more the exams are formal assessments and in this case she is showing that the test is important and important for the parents to know their child's progress. That being said I also believe that math can be a special case because performance goals can lead to repetition and in the case of math repetition can help grasp of the material or even eventual mastery of the subject. Without a doubt though there would be more circumstances that apply though.