Abstract
This paper summarizes three studies with a digital goal-setting intervention for higher education based on hierarchical goal systems (HGS). As a theoretical background, we cover organizational, motivational, and educational psychology findings related to goals, self-regulated learning, and goal systems. Subsequently, we introduce hierarchical goal systems conceptually and present the concrete implementation of the digital HGS intervention and its essential functions. Next, three formative studies with their methods, results, and implications are summarized. We designed the studies to answer the following research questions: which visualization type is most suitable to represent HGS and to function as a visual metaphor in a graphical user interface? Do visualization preferences and performance indicators depend on personality traits? How can priming be used to lead students to personally meaningful educational goals? The results show overall high preference and performance scores for the dendrogram visualization, low scores for the treemap visualization, and heterogeneous scores for the circle packing and the sunburst. These findings are found to be robust over the “big five” or “OCEAN” (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) personality traits (Goldberg, J Pers Soc Psychol 59(6):1216–1229, 1990). The effects of priming tasks on the characteristics of subsequently formulated goals are relatively low, as we measured small effects with rather low significance in 3 out of 32 factors, explainable by alpha error inflation. The chapter concludes with an outlook on the benefits between students and researchers in the upcoming field study with the digital goal-setting intervention.
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The authors acknowledge the financial support from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany for Siddata (project number 16DHB2124).
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Weber, F., Grenz, M., Kernos, J., Lee, J. (2023). The GoalTrees Hierarchical Goal-Setting Intervention for Higher Education. In: Ifenthaler, D., Sampson, D.G., Isaías, P. (eds) Open and Inclusive Educational Practice in the Digital World. Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18512-0_4
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