Leslie LEE
Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS)

Leslie talks about integrating reflection questions that enable students to do goal-setting within their learning process. He evaluates students’ responses to these goal-setting exercises and how it has enhanced their learning in his courses.

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Lee, L. (2024, May 30). Individual goal-setting, monitoring, and evaluating to motivate learning. Teaching Connections. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/teachingconnections/2024/05/30/individual-goal-setting-monitoring-and-evaluating-to-motivate-learning/

 

As instructors, we design and teach courses with specific goals in mind. However, mismatches may occur between our goals for students and students’ goals for themselves.

 

Yet, goals play an important role in motivating learning: they “provide students with a focus for their learning, which leads to more time and energy going to that area of focus” (Ambrose et al., 2010, p. 128). Given the pivotal impact of goals on motivating learning, would it be useful, in addition to the goals that instructors identify on syllabi and assignments, for students to define their own goals when reading a course?

 

Moreover, the explicit identification of their goals is a prerequisite for students to find ways of advancing towards these goals. This can have profound consequences on their future behaviour, as “[w]hen students successfully achieve a goal and attribute their success to internal causes (for example, their own talents or abilities) or to controllable causes (for examples, their own efforts or persistence), they are more likely to expect future success” (Ambrose et al., 2010, p. 78). It is also only when students’ goals are known to instructors that instructors can provide appropriate support to the students.

 

Ambrose et al. (2010) illustrate the interactive effects of environment, efficacy, and value on motivation as shown in Figure 1. In the current context, having students identify personal goals—that they inherently see value in—will encourage them to devise effective ways of working towards their goals and allow instructors to provide a supportive environment, thereby helping students to be most motivated.

Figure 1. Interactive effects of environment, efficacy, and value on motivation (Ambrose et al., 2010, p. 80)

 

One way to have students identify personal goals is to assign reflection questions. Indeed, administering “self-questions” for students to ask in the context of an entire course is one way to promote metacognition (Tanner, 2012), and such metacognitive approaches can “help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them” (NRC, 2000, p. 18).

 

Since 2023, I have integrated reflections in two undergraduate linguistics courses that I teach. Following the metacognitive processes of planning, monitoring, and evaluating (NRC, 2000; Tanner, 2012), I administered reflection exercises at the start, middle, and end of the courses. The reflections accounted for a nominal percentage of the continuous assessment marks for the course and were graded on a “Complete/Incomplete” basis. There were no word-count restrictions and I emphasised to the students that there were no “correct” or “wrong” responses.

 

The first reflection represented the planning or goal-setting stage. It invited students to identify their goals and ways in which they can advance towards those goals. It comprised three questions:

1. Identify your personal goals in choosing to take this course.
2. How do you think your enrolment in this course will help you advance towards these goals?
3. What can you do to help yourself advance towards your goals?

 

The second reflection was the monitoring stage. The questions were:

1. Previously, you identified your personal goals in choosing to take this course. Have your goals changed? Do you have any new goals?
2. Do you think your enrolment in this course has helped you advance towards your goals?
3. What can you do to help yourself advance (further) towards your goals?

 

The final reflection involved evaluating whether they achieved their goals:

1. Previously, you identified and reviewed your personal goals in choosing to take this course. To what extent has your enrolment in this course helped you advance towards your goals?
2. Is there anything that you could have done differently to help yourself advance (further) towards your goals?

 

It also included two other questions:

3. Do you agree with this statement? “The reflections have benefited me in my learning and self-growth.”
4. What (positive or negative) impact has responding to the Reflections throughout the semester had on your learning and self-growth?

Due to space constraints, I only discuss responses to the final two questions here.

 

By and large, students found the reflections beneficial: across three runs of the two courses, with 88% of the students agreeing with the statement in Q3.

 

Two broad reasons were given for disagreeing. The first was that those students already had the practice of self-reflection, and therefore did not find any added benefit in the assigned exercises. The other was that the students did not revisit their reflections after submitting them.

 

Students who found the reflections beneficial cited concrete ways in which these exercises influenced their behaviours. Consistent with the connection between goals and motivation articulated by Ambrose et al. (2010), the reflections kept students motivated:

• “…help me to review…my goals…helps me keep focused and motivates me to keep on track with learning.”
• “…remind me of my initial learning objectives, so that I am more motivated to work towards the goals, and I can reflect upon my learning pace and adjust my learning strategies accordingly.”
• “…helped me to remain motivated…cultivating an overall more positive attitude towards learning…even if the content was challenging.”

 

Also expectedly, the explicit identification of goals was requisite to helping students identify effective ways to achieve those goals:

• “…made me more aware of the goals I have set for myself and more intentional during lessons, which has helped my learning.”
• “Without the reflection, I would not sit down and think about what else I could improve”
• “…helped me try to understand why I am taking this module[sic], as well as how I could get the most out of it”

 

Students also understood themselves better through the process:

• “Like, yes I don’t enjoy the mod, but why is that? … The reflections gave me a time to understand myself better…”
• “it helped to prompt me into the right attitude towards learning … in terms of what I enjoy learning personally and the kind of approaches I can take towards similar problems in my life”

 

It should be fair to say that individual goal-setting, monitoring, and evaluating exercises can have desirable effects on students’ learning and self-growth at little to no cost, and should be more widely encouraged. This may be especially relevant for compulsory courses that students must read to graduate, e.g. the integrated courses in the College of Humanities and Sciences (CHS).

 

References

Ambrose, S.A., Bridges, M.W., DiPietro M., Lovett, M.C., & Norman M.K. (2010). How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. Jossey-Bass.

National Research Council. (2000). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9853.

Tanner, K. D. (2012). Promoting student metacognition. CBE – Life Sciences Education, 11(2), 113-20. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.12-03-0033.

 

Leslie LEE is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies (previously known as the Department of English Language and Literature). He teaches several foundational courses in linguistics, as well as more advanced seminars on morphology and syntax. His research interests cover pattern/construction-theoretic and usage-based approaches to linguistics, interfaces between (*word-based*) morphology, (*non-derivational*) syntax, and (lexical) semantics, dialectal variation, and quantitative approaches to the study of language. Leslie can be reached at leslie@nus.edu.sg.