The Right Goals, at the Right Time

It may seem obvious that if we want a student to achieve a particular learning outcome, then setting that outcome as a goal would support them in achieving it. Yet research into acquiring writing revision skills suggests that the situation might not be quite so straightforward.

Earlier research from the learning of motoric tasks such as dart-throwing has indicated that it may be more advantageous to first focus on a process goal, such as throwing the dart in a particular way, before focusing on the outcome goal of hitting the bulls eye.

Barry Zimmerman from City University in New York and Anastasia Kitsantas from James Madison University decided to see whether the same might be true of more cognitive tasks, such as writing revision. They modeled a particular strategy for revising writing using sentence combining to 84 students in Grades 9, 10, and 11.

The strategy involved three steps, namely circle the new words in each sentence; cross out any repetitive words; and combine the remaining words to make a sentence.

All of the students were taught the strategy and then broken into groups and given varying goals for a set of practice exercises as follows:

• Control Group: this group was not given a specific goal.

• Outcome Goal Group: this group was told to combine the sentences to produce a single sentence with as few words as possible.

• Process Goal Group: this group was told to concentrate on properly carrying out the three key stages of the strategy.

• Shifting Goal Group: this group was initially given the same goal as the process goal group. Once a student had solved three problems without missing any steps, they were asked to shift their goal to that of the outcome goal group.

In addition, half of the students in each group were instructed to record their own progress—either by counting and recording the number of words in the final sentence when working towards the outcome goal, or writing down the number of steps performed correctly when working towards the process goal.

Assessments were made of the students’ writing skill, feelings of self-efficacy, level of intrinsic interest in the task as well as whether they attributed their success or failure to their own ability, the amount of effort they put into the task, or the type of strategy they were using.

What were the results?

• Writing skill: students in the process goal group significantly outperformed students in the outcome goal group, but the shifting goal group significantly outperformed students in all other groups. The control group exhibited the lowest level of performance. Students who participated in ongoing self-monitoring through recording significantly outperformed those who did not.

• Self-efficacy: students in the process goal group felt significantly higher levels of self-efficacy than students in the outcome goal group, but the shifting goal group reported the highest levels of perceived self-efficacy. Students who participated in ongoing self-monitoring through recording felt more self-efficacious than those who did not.

• Intrinsic interest: students in the process goal group reported higher levels of interest than students in the outcome goal group, but the shifting goal group reported the highest levels of interest. Students who participated in ongoing self-monitoring reported higher levels of interest than those who did not.

• Attribution: students in the control group and the outcome goal group most often attributed any perceived deficiencies in performance to insufficient ability. Students in the groups with process goals more often attributed any perceived deficiencies in their performance to either the strategy itself, or to their execution of it. There were no significant differences in attribution found due to participation in self-monitoring.

What does this mean for our classrooms?

The fact that all groups in the study had the same strategy modeled for them before attempting the exercises clearly shows that modeling good strategies alone is not enough. We need to support students in becoming proficient with the strategy before focusing on the outcome itself, by helping them set appropriate process goals before working towards outcome goals.

Coaches often use similar tactics with novice athletes. The authors of the study believe the success of this tactic is based on the way in which we achieve automaticity of skill performance.

Based on their previous research, the authors hypothesize four levels of self-regulation in the acquisition of skills:

1. Observation, where students observe a skill being modeled by an expert.

2. Emulation, where students emulate the model.

3. Self-control, where students consciously monitor their use of a strategy on their own.

4. Self-regulation, where students can automatically perform the skill without conscious self-monitoring.

They propose that this research suggests that having students follow process goals during the self-control stage, until use of a strategy has become somewhat automatic, can facilitate the achievement of later outcome goals.

Focusing first on process goals also seems to have very positive benefits for feelings of self-efficacy, and these correlate with attribution of failure to strategy use or execution rather than effort or ability. It seems likely that this will have an ongoing positive effect on student self-esteem and motivation to learn.

Reference

Zimmerman, B. and Kitsantas, A. (1999) “Acquiring Writing Revision Skill: From Process to Outcome Self-Regulatory Goals” in Journal of Educational Psychology, 91 2, pp. 241-250.

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