#goalsettingtheory

By Dr Xiao Chen, Assistant Professor Tsinghua University Presented at NTU on 4 November 2014.

Four learning points:

When a person already knows how to complete a task, performance goals should be set. The mediator of this relationship is motivation, and it spurs a person on to achieving high performance. This forms the "What" question. When a person does not know how to complete a novel task, focusing on performance goals might result in negative outcomes instead. Learning goals should be set, which will lead to higher performance. The mediator of this relationship is ability. This forms the "how to" question.

There are four moderators of goal setting theory: goal commitment, ability, task feedback and resource availability.

Findings: Priming a context-specific goal indeed resulted in highest performance even after a 4-day delay, followed by a generic goal, and lastly, a neutral prime. All these occur at the subconscious level.

Four ways of testing the success of a prime: Awareness check (most often used in social psych), projective test (check using content analysis of an essay written after the prime), affective arousal and mental representation/semantic construct.

Three after-thoughts: 

Need to perform pilot studies for my own research, especially if looking into behavioural strategy. For the presentation, even the picture to be used for the experiment was tested through a pilot study. The picture of a Rodin Thinker was presented in 8 different angles before finalised. 

When presenting of research, I can consider showing actual pictures of the experiment and results. For example, if a team is working together to create something, anonymous pictures of the actual experiment room and actual creation can be shown (if add value to presentation). This is engaging for me personally, because I can see the actual difference in the result.

What kind of goals should I set for myself, my future students and children?