Characteristics of College Students' Personal Academic Goals, Daily Effort, and Affective Well-Being

• In Event: 30.030 - Intensive Data Approaches to Students' Day-to-Day, Moment-to-Moment Emotions, Motivation, and Engagement

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework. Failing to meet personal academic goals in college, such as completing a final paper or finishing weekly reading materials, often results in poor performance, failing grades, or even class withdrawal. A great deal of research has established the benefits of setting goals for effort and performance (Locke & Latham, 2002). While it is clear that goal setting is important for success, not all goals are effective. Indeed, researchers have examined whether the effects of goals on effort depend on goal characteristics, including self-concordance (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999), utility value (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000), difficulty (Locke & Latham, 2002), and specificity (Earley et al., 1987). To date, however, little work has examined how these different goal characteristics predict college students’ fluctuating daily affective well-being and effort toward their goals. As a result, researchers have overlooked the problem that students tend to overestimate their effort when they are measured across different days (Vanderkam, 2011). To respond to this gap in the literature, the current research examined college students’ personal academic goals, their goal characteristics, and daily affective well-being and hours spent toward their goals using a daily diary research design.

Data Sources and Procedure. 197 college students reported their personal academic goals for the semester (e.g., getting an A grade in Statistics). Participants also responded to questionnaires measuring their goal characteristics including self-concordance, utility value, difficulty, and specificity. For the following two weeks, participants answered a brief questionnaire measuring their daily positive/negative emotions and hours spent toward their goals.

Results. A multiple regression analysis revealed that, among diverse goal characteristics, utility value and self-concordance statistically significantly predict daily hours spent toward goals after controlling for the effects of previous GPA, sex, race, self-control, and social support (Table 1). Specifically, students spent more hours toward their goals when they initially reported high utility value and self-concordance with regards to their personal academic goals. Similarly, utility value and self-concordance were the only statistically significant goal characteristics predicting students’ affective well-being after including control variables. In addition, cluster analyses resulted in four profiles with varying utility value and self-concordance (Figure 1). Analyses of variance indicate that the profile with goals high in both utility value and self-concordance spent more hours and experienced more positive emotions toward their goals over the course of the two weeks than other three profiles (Table 2).

Scholarly Significance. The current research extends previous research on different goal characteristics by showing how these diverse characteristics originated from different research fields (e.g., goal-setting theory, self-concordance theory, and expectancy-value theory) predict students’ daily effort and affective well-being. The results suggest both utility and intrinsic values (i.e., self-concordance), but not difficulty and specificity, play an important role in promoting students’ positive emotions and effort toward their goals over time. Students may spend many hours toward their goals on a daily basis if they feel high utility value of achieving the goal. However, they may not be interested, excited, and inspired by their goals unless they also feel high intrinsic value.

Authors

• Eunjin Seo, Texas State University

• Erika Alisha Patall, University of Southern California