The Effects of Goal-Setting & It's Role in Education
The Effects of Goal-Setting and it’s Role in Education
Author Basil S. Walsh once said “if you don’t know where you’re going, how can you expect to get there?” This quote speaks greatly to the importance of setting goals for oneself, especially in a realm such as academia, where success or failure can stay with a person for a lifetime. Students who set goals for themselves have been shown to perform better than those who don’t, give more effort and be motivated to succeed, which is why goal-setting needs to be used as a tool for students in the classroom. While some may see goal-setting as having the potential to discourage students who do not achieve, research has shown that with the right types of goals, positive feedback, and an understanding of how students deal with failure, goal-setting can be an extremely powerful tool in motivating students. Students use goals for different reasons, from giving themselves something tangible to strive for to ensuring a certain grade point average for a scholarship, but the one constant that comes with goal-setting is the motivation to succeed. Along with information from a handful of other sources, I will rely on three main research experiments covering goal-setting and the areas of effort, feedback, and failure. The work of Silvia, McCord, and Gendolla focuses on goal-setting and its effects on effort, Venables and Fairclough look at the feedback necessary to maximize effort through goal-setting, while Brdar, Rijavec, and Loncaric shed light on students coping with failing to meet set goals. Throughout the paper I will use the term effort interchangeably with motivation, as multiple source studies measured participant motivation through the amount of effort they demonstrated.
Goal-Setting and Effort Before implementing a goal-setting strategy in the classroom, we must first understand how goals are related to students’ motivation and effort output. Through their study of students effort levels based on
Author Basil S. Walsh once said “if you don’t know where you’re going, how can you expect to get there?” This quote speaks greatly to the importance of setting goals for oneself, especially in a realm such as academia, where success or failure can stay with a person for a lifetime. Students who set goals for themselves have been shown to perform better than those who don’t, give more effort and be motivated to succeed, which is why goal-setting needs to be used as a tool for students in the classroom. While some may see goal-setting as having the potential to discourage students who do not achieve, research has shown that with the right types of goals, positive feedback, and an understanding of how students deal with failure, goal-setting can be an extremely powerful tool in motivating students. Students use goals for different reasons, from giving themselves something tangible to strive for to ensuring a certain grade point average for a scholarship, but the one constant that comes with goal-setting is the motivation to succeed. Along with information from a handful of other sources, I will rely on three main research experiments covering goal-setting and the areas of effort, feedback, and failure. The work of Silvia, McCord, and Gendolla focuses on goal-setting and its effects on effort, Venables and Fairclough look at the feedback necessary to maximize effort through goal-setting, while Brdar, Rijavec, and Loncaric shed light on students coping with failing to meet set goals. Throughout the paper I will use the term effort interchangeably with motivation, as multiple source studies measured participant motivation through the amount of effort they demonstrated.
Goal-Setting and Effort Before implementing a goal-setting strategy in the classroom, we must first understand how goals are related to students’ motivation and effort output. Through their study of students effort levels based on