Development of a Digital Goal Setting Companion for Higher Education

Abstract

Goal setting is known to be an effective way to guide behaviour and plays an essential role in self-regulated learning. Goals can serve as benchmarks for the evaluation of behaviour. Recently, research on goal networks instead of isolated goals has received growing interest. In this paper, we present a goal setting intervention that guides university students a) to develop personal educational goals and b) to derive sub-goals, actions and strategies to make those high-level goals tractable. The results are hierarchical goal systems connecting high-level goals to concrete actions. We illustrate the technical implementation as web-based application. Explorative data analysis of data from a paper-pencil preliminary study (n=8) and a first pilot study with a web-based software prototype (n=17) is presented. We conclude with an outlook on further development steps.