It was 1961. The space race was on its peak. Russia managed to put a man in orbit. President John Kennedy at an unusual young age, was dealing with a cold war and a struggling economy. In one speech, he set a quite extreme goal: America would put a man on the Moon and take him back before the end of the decade. On July of 1969, less than six months before the target date, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon's surface. JFK’s initial ambitious goal seemed to be the fuel that propelled such an amazing conquer.
It is late 2017. Juan, a teenager from a mid-income neighbourhood in Montevideo, Uruguay, is having problems with his grades to finish high-school and get a place in the University to become an architect. Would JFK’s recipe work in his case? Can Juan build his way to the University by setting goals that are ambitious enough? Is it the case that his goals are not big enough?
In this essay, I will argue that managing academic goals can be a challenging activity for adolescents in several ways. During adolescence, children face questions about their long term goals while going through a period of high sensitivity to environmental and motivational cues. (Casey, 2015) Evidence show that this sensitivity peaks at 15 years of old, age at which adolescents are most sensitive to incentives. The role of incentives in the goal structure seen in relation to this hypersensitivity, opens room for interventions that may have an impact on motivation.
I will present some evidence on how incentives influence motivation looking at performance in tests by 15-year-old students. Then I will discuss the dimensions that shape goals focusing in those set by students with academic purposes. My aim is to reflect about the causes of poor academic performance of Uruguayan students in liceo(high-school) and to that purpose I will explore the particularities surrounding goal setting under the light of different theories. Finally I will present ways to test the hypotheses and discuss possible interventions derived from the discussion integrating dimensions of the MINDSPACE framework. (Dolan, Halpern, Hallsworth, King, & Vlaev, 2010)
According to the Programme for International Student Assessment(PISA) sponsored by the OECD, 15-year-old Uruguayan student performance in science ranks 47 in 75 countries with no signs of improvement in last 15 years. This result is worrisome considering that the government has doubled the funds invested in education since beginning of the century. Under the same program Singapore is at the top of the rating, China (measured in 4 cities) between the 4thand the 10thposition, and United States is in the 25thposition. However, the ranking may reflect more than student’s academic competences.
A recent study by Uri Gneezy and colleagues(Gneezy et al., 2017) suggest that performance in tests may reflect differences in motivation to perform and not only differences coming from academic capabilities. They conclude that evaluation of academic systems relying in standardized tests should be taken with caution.
In their research they compared the results of an intervention that incentivise effort in the test itself across cultures. The intervention offered students in US and Shanghai a reward related to performance. The reward was announced at the beginning of the test to avoid effects related to difference in preparation in advance. When incentivised, US students, exhibited a significant improvement while in Shanghai there was no improvement at all. Student’s test performance was affected by the “extra” motivation added by the prize which indirectly speaks about the motivation with which student come to the assessment.
Acknowledging that results may be heavily influenced by the motivation with which students work during the test can have important implications. For many different reasons, test results are a building block in the academic trajectory of students. If poor performance in test is not strictly related to strict academic competences but is mediated by motivation, wrong reinforcement of stereotypes and sub-optimal career choices may happen. To improve the understanding about student’s performance in tests it is useful to gain a clearer view about the processes around motivation.
Psychology of motivation has linked the energy driving our actions with our intentions (Ajzen, 1991), and our own expectancies. (Mischel, 1973) Study motivation in relation with goals and conceptualizing goals as internal processes allow us to link motivation with the specifics of goal setting and striving, and to look for the role of external activation of those internal representations (Bargh, Gollwitzer, & Oettingen, 2010).
According to Austin and Vancouver, goal dynamics can be reviewed using six dimensions that play an important role in determining prioritization of goals: Importance-commitment, Difficulty level, Specificity-representation, Temporal range, Level of consciousness, and Conectedness-complexity. (Austin & Vancouver, 1996). It is useful to think about student academic goals under these dimensions.
In terms of Importance-commitment, it is easy to see how the strength with which students link their academic success with their bigger life objectives influence the prevalence of the goal. Stronger associations lead to more frequently accessed memories of the goals.
Difficulty levelrefers to the comparison between the internal representation of the external level of difficulty and the assessments of individual capabilities. Student beliefs about their own competences and their ability to succeed have a major impact on their decision about what to look for and how much energy they should put in doing so.
The specificity-representationdimension refers to how concrete can goals be represented. Vague goals as “do your best” usually lead to lower performance due to the wide range of acceptable performance levels that fulfil it. In contrast, specific goals reduce ambiguity in relation of what it is to be attained. (Locke & Latham, 2002)In terms of exams, with everything else unchanged, clearer assessment criteria should help in a more specific goal setting and should cause an improvement in performance.
Other of the dimensions identified by Austin and Vancouver refer to the temporal rangeof the goals. This influence in various levels starting with prioritization: goals closer in time call for our attention, and sometimes relegate others regardless their importance. There is a dimension of psychological distance(Trope & Liberman, 2010)that enters into this point
Level of consciousnessmay not seem as an important dimension as tests and exams are tasks that demand high level of consciousness. However, McClelland and coauthors (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989)propose three subjacent layers always present in goals that are the need for achievement, the need for power, and the need for affiliation in two dimensions self-attributed and implicit. Many interventions in education target these subjacent forces in order to excite academic behaviours or to remove barriers towards them.
Finally, the connectedness-complexity dimensionrefers to the idea that more complex goals enter in a web of goals interrelation that may pose some conflicts in the goal hierarchy. The Theory of Goals System (Kruglanski et al., 2002)provide a useful toolbox to apply to the analysis of the complexity between mutually exclusive goals as recreation and schoolwork.
By reflecting about goal structure in these dimensions it becomes clear how different characteristics that shape goals relate to its hierarchical position and the amount of resources applied in their pursuit. Different hypotheses can explain why students underperform in tests. Among others, students may undervalue their return on education, they may be highly sensitive to present bias or they may hold misconceptions about the knowledge production function. Reflecting about how students set their academic goals and its effect on academic performance does not pretend to override other hypotheses. It simply acknowledges that the structure of goals plays a role in motivation and that manipulation around them can improve student academic performance.
Students are decision makers. They set strategies to fulfil their long-term objectives, and in their daily lives they make decisions that contribute or challenge them. Behavioural sciences bring a powerful toolset to understand errors in the decision making process and bring to the table some possible solutions. Focusing in problems around motivation in relation to goal structure suggest alternative and complementary tools.
For the summative I pretend to focus in two theoretical bodies to look for possible interventions that remove problems in the goal setting on exams. As mentioned, Construal-level theory builds around the concept of psychological distance that reflects in various of the dimensions identified. Theory of Goals System provide a framework to analyse the goal of succeeding in a single test in relation to other competing or complementary. In relation to methods I pretend to keep the focus around the test itself and explore ways to measure both psychological distance and interrelation between goals.
References
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