Goal Setting within Collaborative Small Group Discussions

Education and Human Ecology: 1st Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)The purpose of this project is to examine elementary students’ goal setting within a collaborative learning context. It is commonly known that setting goals can motivate students toward academic tasks, resulting in improved academic outcomes (West, Ebner, & Hastings, 2013). Students are also more committed to goals that are self-generated than those set by others (Deci & Ryan, 1985). Self-generated goals may play an important role in academic contexts that require high levels of student agency and autonomy because they help students to be more effective in focusing behavioral and cognitive resources toward the desired outcome (Locke & Latham, 2002). However, little research has examined how elementary students set their own goals in student-centered academic contexts. The current study examined students' self-generated goals during collaborative small-group discussions about social-moral issues. Because of the inherently social nature of classrooms, students who are not able to use social knowledge to reason about complex social situations suffer negative outcomes such as reduced academic achievement and psychological well-being (Flook, Repetti, & Ullman, 2005; Filippova & Astington, 2008; Fink et al., 2015; Killen, 2007). As such, improving students’ social reasoning is imperative for both their academic and personal well-being. We hypothesize that self-generated goals that focus students’ attention toward complex cognitive processes of the discussion are predictive of growth in social reasoning in collaborative small-group discussion because they motivate students to allocate cognitive and behavioral resources toward elements of the discussion that require social reasoning. Data were collected during the 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years in two Mid-Western public school districts. The context of this study is a dialogic inquiry intervention called Collaborative Social Reasoning (CSR) (Authors, under review). In this intervention, students read short stories focused on complex issues of social exclusion, then meet in small groups to discuss the “Big Question,” an ambiguous issue stemming from each story. Teachers were trained to facilitate students in their argumentation but gradually remove their support each week as students’ reasoning ability developed. Students participated in one discussion each week for five (year one) or six weeks (year 2). Students’ social reasoning was assessed using an essay task in which students reasoned about an ambiguous social situation. There were two stories used for this task, one completed before and one after the intervention. Students were randomly assigned to read story A or B as a pretest and completed the other at post-test. Students were asked to set goals prior to each discussion and to reflect on those goals afterward. A data-driven approach was used to identify goal topics from students’ self-generated goals. A total of 26 discrete topics were identified. Goal topics were then categorized into one of five types: participation, argumentation, combination (containing elements of both participation and argumentation), logistical, or affective. Goal perspective, or the focus of the goal, was also coded; possible foci were self-participation, others’ participation, self-argumentation, others’ argumentation, and affect. A total of 2166 goals from 140 students in six classrooms were coded. Students tend to focus on their own engagement in the discussion, with over 70% of goal units focused on either self-participation or self-argumentation. 50% of goal units were focused on purely participatory elements of the discussion, with 20% including elements of both participation and argumentation, and only 9% focused purely on argumentation. Students in high and low achieving classrooms also set different types of goals, which might indicate some differences in approach to the intervention in the classrooms of different ability levels.A three-year embargo was granted for this item