Goal setting

What is goal setting?
Goal setting is a key element of self-regulation and behavior change. It effects on behavior in many domains including industry, education, sports, and health care .

Especially promising is research on the effects of personal goals, or individuals’ desires for their current or future lives. These goals provide a sense of meaning and hence can contribute to the feeling of having a purpose in life . Life goals in particular can provide centrality to a person’s identity and give direction to chosen daily activities.https://shouts.site/goal-setting/

Adolescents are often searching for a general sense of purpose or meaning. 40 percent of first-year, full-time undergraduate students in the United States fail to earn their bachelor’s degree within six years.

In Europe Similar graduation rates have been reported for students in 3-year full-time bachelor degree programs. College completion rates have changed very little over the past several decades.

Publicly funded institutions are under pressure to increase graduation rates and enhance student academic achievement.

For some time causal linkages have been made between academic goals and academic outcomes.

For Eg, Latham and Brown (2006) reported the positive effects of MBA students setting a specific, high learning goal on their grade-point averages at the end of the academic year.

Goal-setting theory (Locke, 1968, Locke and Latham, 1990, Locke and Latham, 2013), discussed in more depth below, utilization as a framework for conducting the present study on academic achievement

We also examined associations between a brief, online goal-setting intervention and academic performance.

Goal setting Theory.
An important tenet of goal-setting theory is that task-specific goals elicit task-specific outcomes (Locke & Latham, 1990).

For example, Travers, Morisano, and Locke (2015) found, participation in a diary-based personal growth goal-setting program was related to student performance, and non-academic goals (e.g., stress management) positively impacted self-rated academic growth.

Morisano et al. (2010) found that a 2-hour online, narrative, life goal-setting intervention increased academic achievement, retention rates, and a positive mood among academically “struggling” undergraduate students compared to those in a control condition.

The majority of personal goals set by the struggling students were not about academic achievement.

Over 80% of the students set at least one academic goal, the authors were unable to make definitive conclusions.

Relation of “Goal Setting” and Academics.
An important aim of the present study was to elucidate the mechanisms by which personal goal setting is academically effective for students.

Specifically, we examined associations between the processes involved in a personal goal-setting intervention and academic performance.

Consequently, we compared the academic trajectories of ~2900 first-year university students from four cohorts on the basis of their participation in a brief, 4–6 h, three-stage goal-setting program, using a quasi-experimental design.

Rather than focusing only on struggling students (cf. Morisano et al., 2010), we assessed the efficacy of the intervention for two full cohorts of students, compared to two cohorts of students who did not receive the intervention.

In order to investigate the efficacy of the intervention, its necessary to determined which variables were related to academic outcomes.