Setting overall goals, as well as smaller goals as steps to reaching them, encourages consistent, achievable progress and helps students feel confident in their skills and abilities. When learners create literacy-focused goals, plan out steps to achieve them, and check their progress against these steps, they strengthen their self-efficacy as they build their capacity to successfully tackle difficult challenges. For writing in particular, setting specific goals for the content and audience of a composition leads to improvements in the writing process.
Example: Use This Strategy in the Classroom
Click here to watch this fi teacher use SMART goals with her students. By sharing examples of her students' goals, this teacher provides a concrete overview of what makes up a SMART goal. Through this process, students are able to reflect on their learning and goals.
Teachers can support students by helping them create goals for future learning based on what they do well, what they are excited to learn, and their target areas, then help them monitor their progress towards these goals, developing Self-regulation. Learners feel more motivation to tackle challenging reading and writing assignments with the support of proximal and moderately challenging but attainable goals and micro-goals, since students are less skilled at thinking about a distant future until middle adolescence. For example, setting a goal of reading one chapter a night can help a student feel confident that they can read a longer book. In the same way, setting a goal of providing four examples in a persuasive essay can make a long paper seem more doable.
Design It into Your Product
Videos are chosen as examples of strategies in action. These choices are not endorsements of the products or evidence of use of research to develop the feature.
See how products, such as Toodledo, allow learners to create tasks or lists of goals and self-monitor their progress. With functions like reminders and shareable lists, learners are able to stay more accountable to the goals they set.
To learn more about Toodledo, click here.
For a developer, incorporating milestones or goals that are realistic and pertinent can be highly motivating for learners. For their work to be relevant, learners must also have the opportunity and agency to set some goals personally. A potential framework to follow for giving learners this agency in setting meaningful, attainable goals is SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-Based, and Time-Bound.
Additional Resources
These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements:
- Apps for Goal SettingTen examples for student goal setting
- Google Classroom: A free tool where students can monitor goals and receive immediate feedback
- Progress Monitoring: RtI resource for progress monitoring
- SMART Goals for Students: An in-depth explanation of SMART goals
- Student and Teacher Progress Tracking through Tracker Sheets: Resource on The Learning Accelerator
- WOOP for Classrooms: Character Lab tools and resources about the goal-setting framework: Wish-Outcome-Obstacle-Plan
- Professional Development: Understanding SMART GoalsModule by Sanford Inspire
- Research: Feedback & Peer Assessment: Subtopic that explores research on the effects of quality, type, and source of feedback on student learning on Digital Promise's Research Map
- Research: Metacognition & Self-Regulated Learning: Subtopic that includes research on metacognitive processes that help learners plan what and how to learn on Digital Promise's Research Map
- Research: Self-Efficacy: Subtopic that includes research on the factors that lead people to develop self-efficacy on Digital Promise's Research Map
- Research: Student Goals: Subtopic that explores how student goals relate to academic achievement and their motivation to learn on Digital Promise's Research Map