The Effects of Goal Setting Practices on Performance Motivation in a Personalized Competency Based Education Learning Model

Personalized competency-based education (PCBE) is a new initiative being pushed in school districts. One main concern held by educators is the student apathy towards learning and how this model helps these learners. When students are given choice and flexibility with their learning, which is the main idea of PCBE, one would expect these students to be fairly engaged in their learning. Another pillar of PCBE is goal setting and reflection practices. It has been found that these practices can further boost student engagement in their learning. This study will look at how goal setting practices affect student engagement in a PCBE classroom. Participants of the study will be from a 6th grade science classroom in a public middle school. Each of the students will be asked to go through trial periods of differing frequencies of goal setting. Those trial periods involve a time with no goal setting, daily goal setting, weekly, and then a combination form of goal setting. All students will be asked to reflect on how engaged they thought they were for that day’s class period using a Likert Scale survey based off of the Leaner Engagement Spectrum. The teacher will also be recording their observations of student engagement in their classroom. The means of each trial period will be determined and compared amongst themselves to see which frequency resulted in higher student engagement in learning