JOIN USBalancing the need to provide an affordable, accessible education, with a commitment to transforming students’ lives and preparing them for the future, is an ongoing challenge in higher education the world over.
A transformative educational experience requires students to be engaged and devoted to their studies. Unfortunately, when it’s time to come to class or study for an exam, students often prioritise other activities. This leads to lacklustre academic performance, high dropout rates and even poor employment prospects down the road.
Need for motivation
How can we increase student effort and academic performance? One option is to motivate students with financial incentives such as scholarships or financial aid that require meeting a GPA or performance threshold. However, these programmes are typically expensive and often produce mixed results.
Motivational interventions based on behavioural economics are more promising. The idea here is to modify the study environment to account for students’ biases, self-control problems and decision-making rules. Well-designed behavioural interventions may improve educational outcomes at little or no financial cost.
Among the many possible behavioural educational interventions, goal setting is particularly promising. Intuitively, goal setting might act as an effective commitment device that allows students who lack self-control to increase their study effort.
Better results
A recent collaborative research by Purdue University, University of California-Irvine and University of Florida aims to discover whether goal setting can increase the effort and performance of university students. The research team investigated the effectiveness of performance-based and task-based goals using data on student behaviour collected from a pair of field experiments conducted with nearly 4,000 college students enrolled in an on-campus, semester-long course at a US public university.
The first group of students set goals for the course based on their performance in the midterm, final exam and overall letter grade. The second group set task-based goals for the number of online practice exams they completed priorto the midterm and final exams.
Performance-based goals are more about outputs, while task-based goals focus more on inputs — the specific activities, work and effort a student is putting into a course. The research shows that although performance-based goals have a positive impact, the effects on course outcomes are small and statistically insignificant.
In contrast, having students set task-based goals proved more effective. Task-based goal setting significantly increased practice exam completion. Importantly, task-based goal setting also increased student performance in the course: students who set task-based goals got better grades on average, and were more likely to achieve the top grades of A or A minus. These results suggest that if task-based goals are chosen appropriately, they can be used to improve educational performance and encourage students to make greater investments in their human capital. This is an important result, particularly since goal setting is financially costless and does not need additional infrastructure.
Interestingly, task-based goals were more effective for male students than for female students, both in terms of the impact on the number of practice exams completed and performance in the course. This finding is consistent with evidence from other educational environments that suggests that male students have less self-control than females.
Important implications
These findings have important implications for educators, universities and students themselves. Students should consider setting goals for themselves, and these goals should focus on tasks, such as course attendance, study hours and exam preparation. At the same time, universities should give greater emphasis on goal setting while mentoring students. And educators — professors, instructors and teachers — might consider incorporating task-based goal setting into their classrooms.
(The author is Magner Chair and associate professor of Economics, Krannert School of Management,
Purdue University, USA)