Goal Setting: Enhancing Academic Attitudes and Achievement in High School Gifted Underachievers

The underachievement of gifted students is a well-documented problem in educational research. This study employed an experimental design to determine whether an existing personal goal setting intervention could successfully improve academic attitudes and achievement in a sample of 44 high school gifted underachievers, as well as determine if any patterns existed in students' goal writing exercises. The goal setting intervention included two after-school goal setting sessions for a duration of approximately three hours, whereby students individually reflected on and wrote about personal and academic goals. Students completed three measures of academic attitudes pre-intervention, one-day post-intervention, and three-months post-intervention: the School Attitude Assessment Survey - Revised, the Future Orientation Scale, and the Theory of Intelligence Survey. Achievement data in the form of grade point average was additionally collected for the semester pre-intervention as well as the semester immediately following the intervention. ANOVA results indicated that treatment students experienced significantly higher academic self-perceptions on the School Attitude Assessment Survey and significantly higher gains in grade point averages over the control group. Examination of students' writing revealed that students cited time management as their largest impediment to improving their academic performance. Surprisingly, analysis of student writing indicated that participants in this sample identified themselves as underachievers, but not as gifted. Recommendations from the findings include implementing goal setting curriculum during the regular school day to allow students to monitor their goal progress under the guidance of a teacher or counselor over a longer duration to assist them in goal pursuit