‘VOLUME XI, NUMBER 11

NNOVATION ABSTRACTS

 

Goal-setting and Goal-using: Developing Personal Meaning
To Enhance the Use of Learning Strategies

In an attempt to respond to the needs of education-
ally disadvantaged students, many post-secondary
settings have created courses or independent study
programs to teach learning and study strategies. A
number of these courses have been developed by
studying the academic behaviors of successful learners.
The specific methods and strategies used by these
successful students have been identified and materials
have been developed to teach these procedures to less
successful students. This approach has produced
significant gains for some students. Yet for other
students, who do not know or are unclear about what
they would like to accomplish in college, this approach
has not been as successful. It appears, for these stu-
dents, that what is lacking is a personal context from
which they can develop an understanding of how a
learning skills program can help them attain their life
goals.

One approach to solving this problem is to help
students develop and use a set of long- and short-term
goals to help them guide their academic behavior. The
primary purpose of this approach is to help students
discover how learning strategies and tactics can be
important and/or useful in their own lives. By discov-
ering a relationship between improved learning skills
and the process of achieving personally important
goals, the learning strategies become integrated into a
personal context of things that are valued and strived
for by the individual.

To help students develop a personal context in which
they see the relevance of learning strategies to the
attainment of their goals, a series of goal-setting and
goal-using exercises have been developed. These exer-
cises have been field-tested with more than 1500
students who have participated in a learning-to-learn
course taught in the Department of Educational Psy-
chology at The University of Texas at Austin. (See
Innovation Abstracts, Vol. X, No. 11, for a description of
this course.) The exercises are designed to help stu-
dents focus on the following types of questions:

1. What do I want out of my life? What do I want to

experience, achieve, and/or obtain?

2. How committed am I to the attainment of these
goals?

3. How important is my college education to the at-
tainment of these goals?

4. How do my courses this semester help in the
achievement of my long-term goals?

5. If college is important to the attainment of these
goals and I also am committed to these goals, then
what strategies and methods am I presently using
to help me achieve these goals?

6. In the past, how successful have these methods
and strategies been in helping me reach my
academic goals?

7. If they have not been successful, what are some
methods and strategies that seem to be successful
for other students?

The goal-setting and goal-using exercises that have
been developed focus on long- and short-term goals
and their interrelationship to each other. The long-term
focus helps the students develop personal meaning,
which provides an overall motivation to be in college.
The short-term focus helps translate abstract long-term
goals into concrete actions that can be used to guide
daily behaviors. The focus on the interrelationship
between long- and short-term goals provides the
necded integration of the students’ long-term strategic
pursuits (e.g., college degree), with their shorter-term
practical pursuits (e.g., knowledge and skills froma
particular class), and even their shorter-term task
pursuits (e.g., use of reading skills).

At the long-term level, students begin by identifying
what they would like to experience, achieve, and obtain
during their lifetime. This process begins by having the
students brainstorm long-term academic, occupational,
social, and personal goals. Students are asked to evalu-
ate and prioritize their goals in each of the different
areas to see if they are compatible with each other and if
they meet the criteria of a useful and effective goal
(specific, measurable, challenging, realistic, and with a
stated completion date).

 

  

EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712

THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STAFF AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (NISOD)
Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin

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