p. 63
"Research suggests that avoidance of challenge may be related to motives and goals in somewhat complex ways. Elliott and Dweck (1988), in an experimental study, found that when children were oriented toward mastery goals they were more likely to choose tasks described as challenging and offering opportunities to learn, regardless of their level of perceived ability. But when students were oriented toward performance goals, they chose challenging tasks that served to enhance others' high opinions of their abilities only if they perceived their ability to be high. Children who perceived their ability to be low and were oriented toward performance goals, in contrast, tended to choose tasks described as easy but that would avoid unfavourable judgments of their ability. Some students may feel they are in a double-bind, preferring easy work that does not threaten their self-worth, yet taking on difficult tasks in order to demonstrate their competence or superiority... Elliot and Church (1997) found that performance-approach goals were positively associated with measures of both challenge-avoidance (fear of failure) and challence-seeking motives (achievement motivation). Avoidance of challenge, then appears, to be positively associated with performance-avoidance goals and negatively related with matery goals, but may have a more complex relationship with performance-approach goals."
In other words, the goal has to be to focus teaching and evaluation on the inculcation of mastery goals and the avoidance of situations in which students are encouraged to engage in performance-avoidance. Once they start engaging in performance avoidance, they then stop seeing challenge.