Interest in questions surrounding the relationship between goal achievement and student success brought Kathy Mulray, Dawn Sinnott and Mike Remshard together as a team and have motivated them to pursue a “discovery-oriented” research project. This article is about how their individual interests evolved into a collaborative effort that is now working towards understanding the attributes of student goal achievement that can be maximized to increase the potential for student persistence and academic success at Community College of Philadelphia (CCP). An anticipated outcome of this collaborative effort is to develop a Goal Achievement Program (GAP). This program would be designed for students who have no idea how to begin the goal setting process as well as for students needing only to confirm the appropriateness of their goals and their action strategies. The program is based on the idea that thoughts direct actions, and would emphasize techniques for acquiring the thoughts that will encourage more efficient, productive, and effective behaviors – each and every day. Focusing on goal achievement is not a novel approach; however, the concept of reinforcing strategies that can enable students to develop successful behaviors is less common in academic settings than in sports, business, and corporate cultures. One question that Mulray, Sinnott, and Remshard are attempting to answer is this: Is there a consequential application for this concept at the College?
The team adopted the discovery-oriented approach proposed by Mahrer (1988) to identify and understand the interconnections among the conditions, operations, and consequences that foster positive outcomes. They analyzed the literature to discover the “conditions” that have an application to the needs and circumstances of CCP students. Various interventions in the form of workshop presentations have included one-on-one and small group activities. In addition, immediate consequences or outcomes have been solicited through students’ assessment of their experiences. The literature supports and this team believes that the long-term consequences of empowering students in a self-determined direction towards successful goal achievement will be improved persistence and academic success.
Each member of this collaborative effort has brought unique and consequential experiences to the project.
Kathy Mulray, Northeast Regional Center Site Administrator, has experienced first-hand how students with unclear academic and/or career goals struggle at CCP. When they take the College’s placement test, students complete the New Student Goal Statement and many identify themselves as needing assistance in identifying goals and creating educational plans, but little follow-up is ever initiated. Consequently, Mulray has observed that students who chronically struggle find it increasingly more difficult to seek out student resources and support services. These experiences motivated her to focus her research on the relationship between students’ success and clearly defined academic and career goals. This research also investigated how to identify students in need of additional support, keep them enrolled in school, and possibly develop a program to assist students in clarifying their goals and then successfully working toward goal achievement.
Dawn Sinnott, a research associate in the Office of Institutional Research, spends considerable time investigating patterns of student outcomes and persistence. Her work has helped document that more than 50% of the College’s first-time students do not return for a second year. Student attrition has been a focal point of discussions and research not only at CCP, but also in all of higher education. However, despite all of the dialogue and intervention strategies, a large number of students continue leaving college each year without attaining their educational objectives.
In pursuing her dissertation research on the attributes of student success, Sinnott has found that integrally linking the importance of student goals with student persistence is a reoccurring theme in retention research. For example, Tinto’s theory of student integration argues that upon entering college, students’ preexisting character attributes frame their individual goals and commitments (Seidman, 1996). The same research demonstrates that the extent to which students’ goals and commitments are integrated, academically and socially, into the college experience determines the students’ departure decisions.
Sinnott found that C. Richard Snyder’s theory of hope may have relevance for CCP students with undefined goals. Snyder, professor of clinical psychology at University of Kansas, emphasizes linking cognitive engagement with behavioral and motivational engagement.. Relating the constructs of hope to student goals, he defines hope as “the cognitive process of defining one’s goals, along with the motivation to move toward those goals (agency) while establishing the planned directions to achieve those goals (pathways)” (Snyder, 2002). In other words, hope theory postulates that people get stuck for three reasons: (1) not identifying their goals, (2) failing to create priority and alternative pathways to their goals, and (3) underestimating their capacity to initiate and sustain movement toward their goals. Synder has developed an assessment for identifying levels of hope that could prove useful in recognizing new students who are at risk because of uncertainty about their direction and purpose, or who are unclear about how to achieve their goals.
Mike Remshard, a counselor at the Northeast Regional Center, had recently come to CCP from Northwestern Human Services, where he assisted its addiction recovery program in achieving accreditation from the Council on Accreditation (COA). At CCP, Remshard noticed that struggling students seemed to have similar characteristics to people struggling to change bad habits at the recovery center. For example, he generally noticed that struggling students exhibit some thoughts, feelings, and behaviors akin with people identified in the addiction literature (Bishop, 2001). For example, they may see themselves as victims, feel resentful, do not identify specific behavior changes that need to occur, do not seek out assistance, and have low frustration tolerance (Downing, 2005). He thought it would be interesting to develop a “recovery program” for students that would focus on students’ thinking and behavior related to success, in an attempt to change poor academic and career planning skills.
When working with struggling students, Remshard also noticed their behavior seemed to fit the stage model of change developed by Prochaska and DiClimente. This transtheoretical approach to behavior change identifies six stages of change that addicted people often go through:
This research also offers corresponding motivational strategies for each stage which Remshard feels may be helpful to some of the struggling students he finds at the College.
Working at the Northeast Regional Center, Remshard has a way of identifying and working with struggling students. He found that the “stage of change” model could help determine a student’s mindset, allowing him to then apply principles of rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT) (Ellis, A. and MacLaren, C., 2005). The REBT framework helps individuals change their beliefs, emotions, and behaviors that block realistic goal attainment, as well as to apply this learning in subsequent situations.
Initially, it was not Remshard’s intent to provide academic counseling through the lens of the stages of change model and REBT. It was more simply based on doing what worked with students and doing less of what didn’t. Rather, his intent was focused on establishing a candid relationship with the student in the room at that moment, identifying the problem, the alternatives, and actions.
Through service on various committees, Mulray, Sinnott, and Remshard discovered they shared common interests and wanted to apply their interests to benefit students. The administrator, the researcher, and the counselor had different but complementary perspectives, and were in search of a place to integrate their ideas and test them out with the people who mattered most—CCP students.
Emerging from this synergy is a pilot Goal Achievement Program (GAP). GAP is designed to explore the interconnections among conditions and operations that can empower students towards goal attainment. In its still-evolving state, GAP has been presented in a series of workshops, in full to two different groups of students and in part to a third group. Students’ assessment of the material presented was positive. Even more positive were students’ unsolicited comments about the personalized interest and concern offered to them as they struggled with how to achieve their academic and career goals.
Next Steps
The GAP team plans to continue learning more about the conditions, operations, and consequences that empower students to stay in school. To this end, they are continuing GAP research and refinements, which include:
Exploring the usefulness of the “hope scale” in identifying students who have (1) failed to identify their goals, (2) failed to create priority and alternative pathways to their goals, and/or (3) underestimated their capacity to initiate and sustain movement toward their goals.
Researching what “low hope” students need to construct the basic pathways to their goals. Some recent feedback from new students provided insight into students’ need for understanding (1) different components of the College, (2) differences in curricular requirements (i.e. humanities vs. social science), and (3) how to set goals, measure progress, and prioritize action steps.
Developing strategies/methods for orienting students to the cognitive processes of reflection concerning learning, short- and long-term goals, and problem solving. Some form of coaching would then be provided to help students actualize their reflection through their behaviors.
Finding out what strategies work. Student behavior has many determinants, but the team feels that recognizing a student’s motivation level and problem solving ability provides an opportunity not only to teach content, but to emphasize metacognitive strategies, so students can begin to sort out which types of thinking are constructive and which types hinder learning.
Most of all, Mulray, Sinnott, and Remshard hope that the Goal Achievement Program will stimulate a dialogue at CCP and initiate ways of identifying students who are at risk for attrition. They also look forward to implementing strategies that will stimulate these students to persist in school. They invite your feedback, and welcome your interest in this endeavor to enrich the process of learning.
References
Ellis, A. (2002). Overcoming resistence. A rational emotive behavior therapy integrated approach.New York:Springer Publishing.
Snyder, C. R. (2002). Hope theory: Rainbows of the mind. Psychological Inquiry, 13(4), 249-275.
©Copyright 2005. Contact author for permission
Maintained by Jay Howard,Sept 2005