Students' Goal Achievement: Exploring Individual and Situational Factors

This paper reports a preliminary investigation of the individual and situational factors affecting goal achievement in a psychology student population. The impact of normative information on goal achievement is considered in relation to goal commitment, optimism, gender and academic setting. Method. Psychology students (n = 121) from two British universities completed a cognitive task after being told that others had found the task easy (high-performing norm) or difficult to achieve (low-performing norm). A control condition was also used where no normative information was given. Measures of Optimism (Life Orientation Task, Scheier & Carver, 1985) and Goal Commitment (Klein et al., 2001) were taken and comparisons between the goal achievement of groups high/low in each of these was considered, along with differences according to gender and university. Results. The results show that when given normative information regarding the performance of others participants high in optimism gained higher goal achievement scores than those low in optimism, but only under the low performing norm condition. No other significant differences were found in the experimental conditions. However, in the control group significant differences in goal achievement were seen between high and low goal commitment participants as well as between the participants at the two universities. Conclusion. The unexpected findings indicate that there may be the potential for pre-existing factors relating to the student that have a greater impact upon goal achievement than the experimental manipulations used here. Further research is being undertaken to investigate these.