To study the effects of goal content and motivation on academic performance, a learning activity where participants were tasked with reading a passage about ecological issues was framed either as to help them save money (extrinsic) or contributing to the community (intrinsic). It was found that when the task was framed as being useful for an intrinsic goal, participants had improved deep-level processing, test-performance and free-choice persistence (compared to extrinsic). Additionally when there were autonomy supportive instructions ("you can..."/"we suggest..") deep-level processing, test-performance and persistence was improved (as compared to controlled instructions such as "you have to..."/"you should...")