Memory Key Newsletter

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T h e M e m o r y K e y
<http://www.memory-key.com>

Your resource for information about memory and memory improvement

October 2006

http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_91.htm

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THIS MONTH ON MEMORY-KEY.COM:

SETTING GOALS

GOAL-SETTING IN STUDENTS

SWICKI!

BLOG

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The e-book on "Remembering intentions" is now $9.95!

Check it out at:
http://www.memory-key.com/shop/intention_ebook.htm

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Find out about my YA novel at:
http://www.fmmcpherson.com/

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SETTING GOALS

Goals are the driving force of human behavior; goals, it is believed, provide the organizing structure for all that we do.

Setting goals is vital for any intention-related behavior, from remembering errands or preparing for an exam to accomplishing long-term goals such as getting a degree or losing weight. Although the language is a little different, depending on the context of the discussion (researchers in one field talk of behavior-oriented goals vs outcome-oriented goals, while others talk about process goals and outcome goals, and others of performance goals and mastery goals, and so on), still, whether we are talking of study goals or skill goals or career goals or personal goals, the basic principles are much the same.

The first principle is that effective goals are very specific. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for more general goals, but to achieve the general goal you need specific, clearly articulated, goals to guide your journey.

But it’s not enough for your goals to be clearly specified; for that to be useful, you must also be committed to achieving that goal. Goal commitment is thought to be determined not only by the perceived value of the goal, but also by the person’s expectation that they can actually achieve it.

Moreover, goal commitment is not entirely independent from the nature of the goals you’ve specified. It’s assumed that a person will choose the method of achieving the goal that offers the best chance of success — an assumption I’m not at all sure is warranted, but certainly, your success in achieving your goal will be affected by the means you’ve chosen, and certainly the expectancy of achievement must play some part in selecting this means.

Choice of means is also affected by how many means there are. Obviously, the more different ways there are to achieve a goal, the less chance any particular one has of being chosen.

So whether we achieve a goal depends on:
· How important it is to us
· How likely we believe we are to achieve it
· How effective the means we have chosen is
· How many different ways there are of achieving the goal

There’s another factor that’s important in determining your perseverance — whether you can maintain your goal as time to achievement stretches out — and that is whether you can see any progress towards your goal. This points again to the importance of setting realistic progress goals — staging posts on your journey. It also suggests that feedback will be helpful.

Feedback, however, can be a two-edged sword. While objective feedback (feedback that tells you accurately how you’re doing against your goals) is certainly helpful, it is not always motivating. Comparisons of older and younger adults, in particular, have shown that older adults do not always show improved goal performance when given objective feedback.

A lot of the problem can be seen as stemming from setting your goals at too high a level. In such cases, progress can be dispiriting, and you abandon your task. But this is not the fault of the progress! It is the goal level that’s to blame.

Some people are more vulnerable to this than others. Research suggests that people who don’t have a strong belief in themselves and their abilities (and this includes many older people) will be more vulnerable to feedback that isn’t positive. On the other hand, people with a strong belief in themselves are more likely to respond to negative feedback with increased motivation to try harder.

So you need to use this information to tailor your own goal program. You should always strive to form realistic goals, but if you tend to be motivated by failure, you can afford to set more challenging goals. If, on the other hand, you easily lose your motivation when you don’t do as well as you expected or hoped, then be generous in setting your progress goals. Make sure they are well within your grasp. If you think setting ‘easy’ goals is cheating somehow, assure yourself your ultimate goal is the same; all you are doing is setting smaller steps on the journey — and thus making it more likely that you will arrive at journey’s end.

What’s important is that you can see that you’re making progress.

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GOAL-SETTING IN STUDENTS

The importance of goals in the academic environment can be seen in research showing that self-management practices such as prioritizing tasks are predictive of college students’ grade point averages.

But some goals are more useful than others. The trichotomous achievement goal model distinguishes between performance-approach, performance-avoidance, and mastery goals. Performance-approach goals are ones aimed at attaining a certain level of competence at a skill, while performance-avoidance goals are ones that focus on avoiding some level of incompetence, and mastery (or learning) goals focus, as the name suggests, on mastering (or improving) the skill. Research suggests that mastery goals are the best, in that you will be more likely to achieve a deeper level of understanding and have a higher level of intrinsic motivation (interest in and enjoyment of a subject for its own sake) — this in turn is presumed to lead to greater persistence and long-term effort.

Performance goals, on the other hand, have been thought to undermine intrinsic motivation (actually I think much of our education system undermines intrinsic motivation — as witnessed by the rather sad comment by my son that even if school offered the subjects he was really interested in, he wouldn’t want to take them because they’d just destroy his interest in them). However, studies have been mixed on this aspect, and it appears the reason might lie in a confusion between performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals. Evidence suggests it may predominantly be performance-avoidance goals that undermine intrinsic motivation. However, to return to our discussion of feedback and goal commitment, it might also be that performance-approach goals are more likely to undermine intrinsic motivation when the person experiences failure. In other words, those who use performance goals rather than learning goals are more likely to be discouraged in the face of difficulties.

Performance goals in general are associated with a more superficial processing of material, but performance-approach goals, like mastery goals, are positively associated with persistence, effort, and exam performance, while performance-avoidance goals (definitely the ones to avoid!) are positively associated with disorganization instead.

All this suggests that performance goals aren’t all bad (as long as we’re talking about positive (approach) goals and not negative (avoidance) goals), and students with such goals can do well on tasks that aren’t too demanding. However, it does seem that students with these goals tend to be more easily discouraged when the going gets tough. But the main reason for this may not be their goals as such, but beliefs that are typically associated with them.

Students who tend to form performance goals rather than mastery goals tend to believe that intelligence is a fixed attribute. Thus when they come to something difficult, they’re inclined to think it’s simply too difficult for them — that they simply don’t have the intellectual ‘grunt’ to grapple with it. Students who form mastery goals, on the other hand, tend to believe that ability is something you can work on, and thus, when they come to something difficult, they’re more likely to respond by working harder.

People who favour performance goals are also more likely to be anxious. Both anxiety and self-efficacy (belief in your ability to control the outcome of your behavior) have been shown to affect academic performance — especially in mathematics.

A particularly interesting study demonstrating the interaction between achievement, goal type, difficulty level, and anxiety/confidence, involved students in a remedial mathematics class (college level). The study found that those who were good at setting goals and favored learning goals rather than performance goals got the highest grades, significantly better than all other groups, including those with who were good goal-setters, but formed both learning and performance goals.

Moreover, of the high performance-goal, low learning-goal students who failed a test, 50% did the same or worse on the next test, while for high learning-goal, low performance-goal students, only 16% didn’t do better on the next test — supporting the view that mastery goals are less vulnerable to failure.

But why did students high in both goals not do as well as those who were high for learning goals but low for performance goals? The researchers suggested that the answer lies in the interaction with anxiety. Mathematics as a subject is peculiarly associated with anxiety, and it’s suggested that performance goals are more likely to trigger such anxiety, to the detriment of performance. High learning-goal, low performance-goal students were significantly less anxious.

So where does that leave us? I suggest that students should be encouraged to set specific learning goals, but that this be done in the context of teaching a raft of important self-regulation skills — which have at their core the task of convincing students that these are learnable skills that will improve their performance. First, people need to believe they can control the outcome; then they need to know how to improve their outcomes; and then their confidence will rise and their anxiety drop. All of which will feedback in to improving performance.

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SWICKI!

If you've visited my site recently, you might have noticed my new swicki. A swicki is a community-driven search engine — a search engine that learns from the users in the community. I’ve instructed this one to give priority to my website, so it will hopefully serve as a way of searching my website, as well as to the wider web. I hope you’ll check it out. I’ve deleted inappropriate sites from the first 2 or 3 pages for some popular queries (like photographic sites for photographic memory, and computer memory sites); I hope you’ll do more. That’s the beauty of the swicki – everyone painlessly working to create a useful tool. Check it out and see what I mean!

It’s just on the home page and the blog pages at the moment, but I do plan on adding it to the others.

If you want to learn more about swickis (maybe develop your own), its home site is: http://swicki.eurekster.com/

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BLOG
www.memory-key.com/blogger.html

Latest posts:

* anxiety disorders and physical disorders
* Neurofeedback for emotional control
* caffeine and fetal brain development
* losing money really is painful
* facial expressions inherited

* early mammals nocturnal?
* Genes, environment and depression
* Internet therapy for depression
* More on mirror neurons
* why our eyes move constantly
* advantages of a Montessori education
* brain region linked to selfish behavior
* compulsive shoppers

Note that the blog is indexed chronologically at
http://www.memory-key.com/indices/blog_index.htm

And by subject, at http://www.memory-key.com/indices/blog_index2.htm

You can also access my blog with an RSS feed. The URL is
http://memory-key.com/ftp.memory-key.com/atom.xml, or just click the
Bloglines button on the sidebar of my blog.

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