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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Offers 40 concrete, practical tools and activities that will supercharge learners' ambition, organisation, persistence and determination. Where some education books focus on how individual teachers might sequence and deliver pieces of information in the clearest, most helpful and supportive way, engaging as many learners as possible, this one is different. This book looks at how you can help learners manage their workload and take control of their own knowledge and skills. It explores the characteristics, qualities and habits of successful students and shares forty replicable tools and tactics that all students can use immediately, both in and out of the classroom – activities that will help them to set goals, work more efficiently, organise their resources, revise more effectively and solve problems. This book is a perfect introduction to the VESPA approach, as well as being a practical addition to previous resources. The VESPA Handbook will help teachers develop the five key characteristics and behaviours that students need to be successful: vision, effort, systems, practice and attitude. When it comes to achieving academic success, these characteristics are crucial. Suitable for teachers, tutors and parents who want to boost academic outcomes in 14–18-year-olds and equip them with powerful tools and techniques in preparation for further education and employment.
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Praise for The VESPA Handbook
Martin Griffin and Steve Oakes clearly understand what makes both students and their teachers tick! In this highly practical handbook, they’ve taken leading-edge educational research and combined it with their own teaching experience to create a host of easy-to-follow activities, many of which can be completed in the brief window of tutorial time. This is a fantastically rich resource that should be required reading for anyone working with young people who aren’t yet fulfilling their potential – it should certainly be on the bookshelf of every head of sixth form.
Becky Cox, School Effectiveness Adviser, HFL Education
There’s a lot to love in The VESPA Handbook. I really like the fact that it’s rooted in reality and is extremely useful for the teacher who has concerns for all their students. The advice and direction offered to teachers is exemplary, privileging honest attainment and success at a human level, which, in turn, makes the handbook indispensable. I’m grateful to Martin and Steve for writing it.
Hywel Roberts, teacher and writer
This book superbly builds upon the first editions by enabling students and teachers to deliver activities bespoke to need. Activities you can pick up and deliver that need no previous study or experience can be used by schools and colleges to support their learners in a variety of capacities to enable both academic and well-being progress. With a keen focus on developing metacognitive skills and enabling learners to self-evaluate their own development needs, it encourages educational practitioners to think beyond the curriculum and more about key life skills essential for learners’ ongoing transitional journey to further and higher levels of study and career pathways. These activities will definitely refresh and uplift the VESPA model further.
Siân Farquharson, Post-16 Professional Learning Lead Partner, Education Achievement Service
Post-pandemic, nothing is quite what it once was. More students than ever seem to need extra support to enable them to study effectively. This latest book in the brilliant VESPA series acknowledges things have changed. This handbook provides teachers with a superbly curated set of new activities for students, which are organised upon the original VESPA structure but are shaped to address the new normal in the classroom. It’s an essential resource for anyone trying to boost students’ commitment to their studies.
John Tomsett, erstwhile head teacher, consultant and author
iiSteve and Martin have the incredible ability to frame ideas and suggestions to develop learner habits in a way which just simply makes sense to teachers and students alike. Their research is relevant, and their suggestions are presented in an inviting style while challenging our students to truly reflect on how they are as learners and how they could be much more successful. A true staple of a successful curriculum.
Suzanne Ingram, Deputy Head Teacher, Spalding Grammar School
The VESPA Handbook begins with a vital question: what are the characteristics and behaviours of successful students? In this fascinating student guide, Oakes and Griffin explore the mindsets and practices of successful students, using their findings to help readers achieve similarly impressive results. With a range of sensible strategies and a wealth of practical advice, this is the perfect book for students who are keen to improve their study skills and reach their full academic potential.
Mark Roberts, English teacher and Director of Research, Carrickfergus Grammar School
iii
Authors’ Note
Imagine you’re set this challenge.
Every day, you must arrive at a designated room at a specific time. Once there, you’re given a jigsaw piece. The piece will be small, the image on it an elusive and unreadable splinter of something bigger.
The next day, you’re going to show up and be given a second piece. It will fit into the first. There’s still not enough to speculate about what image might be represented, but the following day you’ll get a third, and it will fit the first two.
You’re going to keep collecting pieces a day at a time for two years. Sometimes the new bits you receive will fit with pieces you already have, but sometimes – and this comes as a surprise – they’ll seem to be entirely unrelated. Sometimes you’ll be given duplicates of pieces you’ve already collected – this will feel frustrating. And sometimes you’ll get pieces that seem to belong to different jigsaws altogether.
Sometimes the images on the pieces are sharp and recognisable, and at other times they’ll be fuzzy. Since you’re only human, on occasion you’ll lose pieces you’ve been given in the past. Now and again, you’ll forget to slip the day’s piece into its slot when you get home and wind up a week later with a jumbled pile of homeless pieces.
There are days when you’ll be unwell and miss a delivery, and if this happens often enough, gaps will open up in your jigsaw, weakening the overall picture. To make matters worse, when you look back at older pieces, you’ll find that whatever image was once there has begun to mysteriously fade.
When your two years are up, you’ll have pieces running into many hundreds. Your final challenge will be to assemble this multitude of components and then demonstrate your complete understanding of the picture shown. And you’ll take a test, the results of which will have the potential to change the course of your life.
Oh, and you’re building maybe ten jigsaws simultaneously. Good luck!
Let’s stay with this metaphor just a little while longer. What skills might you need to complete this epic task successfully? vi
When you’re learning something in increments like this, two years is a long time. There are going to be days – whole weeks even – when you’ll wonder why you’re bothering, so you’re going to need to figure out how to stay motivated, imagining a positive outcome down the line. And, since that jigsaw doesn’t build itself, you’ll need the determination to get out of bed every day, collect your piece and think hard about where it fits with the others.
Other skills spring to mind: storing your pieces will be crucial – losing them, misplacing them or leaving them scattered randomly will destroy your ability to read the image. There’s also the issue of the fading pieces to tackle; without proper attention, those colours will bleach to nothingness. And what of the psychological pressures? That test at the end looks scary; you’ll need to develop the ability to handle stress, beat frustration and remain optimistic, even during setbacks.
Where some education books focus on how individual teachers might sequence and deliver pieces of information in the clearest, most helpful and supportive way, engaging as many learners as possible, this one is different.
It looks at how we might help learners to manage the process of acquiring each new jigsaw piece of knowledge and skill. We’re going to be exploring the characteristics, qualities and habits of successful students, and we’ll share forty replicable tools and tactics that all students can use immediately in and out of the classroom – activities that will help them to set goals, work more efficiently, organise their resources, revise more effectively and solve problems.
All of which is going to help them build better jigsaws.
email: [email protected]
X: @VESPAmindset
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the wonderful team at Crown House for their patience and positivity during the writing of this book. A lot has changed since we first put pen to paper five years ago – not least the concept, the title, the scope and much of the content. And that’s without mentioning the small matter of a global pandemic. So, thanks go to David Bowman and Beverley Randell, and to Tom, Amy, Lucy, Jonathan and all the other members of the team who have helped. Thanks also to Emma Tuck, whose perception and attention to detail have improved the prose immensely, and to all the others who read rough drafts and made suggestions.
Perhaps most importantly, though – if you’re a teacher or leader who has read our work, used the materials, shared the books, spoken enthusiastically about VESPA, suggested the model to others, written research about it, completed a qualification based on it, requested that we visit to discuss the model further, thanked us for our newsletters, used our psychometric, shouted about us on social media or stayed behind to say hello after a training session – thank you.viii
Contents
Introduction
2We’ve been teaching for twenty-five years apiece, but for the last fifteen or so, we’ve also been building a body of work on another related project. Working with young people at Key Stage 3, 4 and 5, we’ve had one research question in our minds: what are the characteristics and behaviours of successful students?
When we began this project back in 2010, the whole thing was pretty rough and ready. We had some developing awareness of what we could see the highest performing students doing, but we were far from sure. When we watched them in class, as we often did, we saw them do things differently: they’d take more detailed notes, sit towards the front if given a choice, hand homework in early and request that it be checked through, keep their focus on the progress they’d made even when times were tough, or make a note of the kind of grades they wanted by the end of the course. Gradually, over the next four years, we continued to watch students, interview them, collect further behaviours and experiment with thematic groupings, so we could more easily codify what we were seeing.
What interested us back then – and still does now – was the potential for improving outcomes for all students by clarifying and democratising access to the tactics that high-performing students were using. It’s a topic we’re still obsessively investigating. Over the last decade and a half, we’ve spent lots of our time talking to students in the UK and beyond about things like:
The struggles they face in their studies.The solutions they develop for those challenges.The revision methods they use.The strategies they have for staying positive and motivated when work is hard.The ways in which they organise their files of notes.We also speak to teachers about their impressions of their learners to see if we’ve missed anything. What we’ve been trying to flesh out for all these years is our understanding of what exactly we should be telling our students to do differently when they study. This means avoiding survivorship bias: there’s little point in gathering the habits of the most successful learners if those precise habits are also in evidence among the ones who fail. Research from academics around the world has been incredibly helpful, and you’ll see a lot of it referenced in this book, but there’s something particularly special about collecting primary data: impressions from real students doing real work. Every time we discover something new, some nugget of information or facet of behaviour that distinguishes the most successful, we try to 3write it up, turning it into a resource which makes that tactic learnable by others.
However, the characteristics and behaviours we’ve spent three books detailing took some years to come into focus. Back in 2010, all we had was a jumbled list of actions that typified the learners making the most progress. Whenever we were stumped by exam outcomes we didn’t expect or by progress that had seemingly faltered, we’d dive deep into the student’s behaviours. How had they behaved in and out of class? How had they approached their studies? What had been missing? We quickly realised that past performance didn’t guarantee future performance; that a range of metacognitive factors played a significant role in determining the grades students achieved.
But we had a decision to make: what factors looked like they might be the most important? Which could we most easily change? The research was confusing. Some studies we read extolled the virtues of self-efficacy; others found links between time management and exam outcomes; still others made a case for confidence or conscientiousness as key characteristics.
Eventually, after four years of hard work, we finally arrived at a model that we thought accurately identified the most important behaviours we were seeing. It was the VESPA model, and its components are:
Vision.Students who got great exam grades had a developing awareness of what success looked like for them. They had some sense of how education was going to be valuable, and had begun clarifying their aims and ambitions. They also had a stronger bias for action than others, tending towards doing rather than just ruminating.Effort.Successful students were outworking their peers, often significantly. Once we began to quantify effort, we quickly found high-performing students who were working four or five times harder in a typical week than those who underperformed. They were proactive setting themselves work rather than passively waiting for instructions.Systems.High-performing students organised their learning materials in a way that meant they understood the structure and content of the course; they knew where its edges were, what was on the syllabus and what wasn’t. They also looked ahead, organised their time, completed work in multiple sittings and sequenced activities so they met deadlines.Practice.The students with the best grades revised differently. They began like the others did, rewriting their notes and checking study guides and textbooks, but 4soon after that they were designing study sessions in which they used the information they’d learned to solve problems under timed conditions. They operated at the edge of their ability and obsessed over the things they couldn’t do rather than restudying the topics they felt confident about.Attitude.There was a psycho-emotional component to the success of the learners who made the most progress. They had developed habits of mind which promoted determination and tenacity; they felt they were in control of the grades they were going to get, saw feedback as a vehicle for further development, managed to stay positive when study was hard and maintained a belief that they were capable of even more improvement.Little did we know, as we assembled this model at a comprehensive school in Greater Manchester back in the autumn of 2014, that 3,500 miles away in Canada, three researchers were beginning work on an experiment that was to discover something remarkably similar.
That same year, Associate Professor of Economics Graham Beattie began working alongside Jean-William Laliberté and Philip Oreopoulos to study a huge group of undergraduates at the University of Toronto (Beattie et al., 2016). Our contexts couldn’t have been more different; while we were treading the corridors and classrooms of an urban comprehensive in the North of England, Beattie, Laliberté and Oreopoulos were working with students studying at Canada’s most prestigious university.
Founded in 1827, the University of Toronto is something of a hallowed institution. Like some of the UK’s oldest universities, it is composed of a series of semi-autonomous colleges. In 2023, the Times Higher Education Rankings graded Toronto as Canada’s best university, standing at eighteenth worldwide* – sitting comfortably in the tranche just below Oxford, Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, alongside UCL, Cornell and New York University – although with a research profile that puts it comfortably in the world’s top ten. In the year of the study, the average admissions grade of the students involved was 87% (Beattie et al., 2016, p. 8) – the UK equivalent of, let’s say, an A* and two As at A level.
As the students arrived at university for the first time, no doubt excited to settle into their new accommodation, explore their new city and experience life at undergraduate level, the research team asked them to complete a one-to-two-hour ‘warm-up exercise’ – to fill out a series of questionnaires. These 5questionnaires, the researchers informed the students, would be worth 2% of their final first-year mark and would involve simple, short prose answers to questions about ‘procrastination, study habits, social identity, academic expectations, grit, risk aversion, time preference, [and] locus of control’ (p. 3) as well as, for the subset we’re interested in, levels of effort, persistence of interest, the ability to defer gratification and finally, a goal-setting exercise.
Just over three thousand students took part in the subset we’ll discuss – a huge sample.
Once the three researchers had collected the data, they simply waited. At the end of the first year, all the undergraduate students had to complete an exam. The stakes were high: they had to pass to complete the first year successfully and progress to the second. A career in the classroom might lead us to believe that past performance equals future performance, and that the precise grades that students achieved before arriving at university might be the only predictor of success at this new level. Furthermore, we might think that, since the students had all done exceptionally well previously, there would be little issue with underperformance in the cohort.
That wasn’t the case. Instead, there was a normal distribution curve of performance, with the highest performers averaging twice the marks of the lowest. The researchers chose two samples: the outliers at the top and bottom of the year. The ‘performance gap between the two outlier groups [was] colossal,’ they noted (p. 10). ‘Divers’ fell in the bottom 10% of their year group, averaging 40% in their exam and having to retake the test (every single diver had to be placed on probation at the end of the first year). ‘Thrivers’, by contrast, ended up in the top 10%, with an average score of 81%, outperforming most of their peers.
The research team then went back to the questionnaires of these two distinct groups to ask themselves whether the questionnaire responses collected in the first two weeks at university could have predicted exam performance many months later. First, though, they put a potential misconception to bed. Past exam performance was indeed a good indicator of whether a student would dive or thrive, but, ‘When no demographics are included,’ they noted – and here the italics are ours – ‘lessthan20%oftheobservedvariationincollegegradesisexplainedbyadmissiongrades’ (p. 14).
So, what diddetermine the students who ended up in the two samples? The patterns they discovered are fascinating.
Visionplayed a part. Divers and thrivers set different types of goal; where thrivers focused on the process of learning and the purpose of acquiring a degree – the kinds 6of work they might end up doing or the real-world problems to which they would contribute solutions – divers had goals that specified levels of wealth or status. Thrivers had what we call ‘do’ goals; their language focused on active verbs – ‘building’ networks, ‘solving’ problems, ‘working’ at challenges, ‘contributing’ to teams – what the study called ‘philanthropic goals’ (p. 21). Divers, by contrast, had what we refer to as ‘have’ or ‘be’ goals; stative verbs about ownership such as ‘having’ a house or car or ‘being’ rich. The process of acquisition, and the associated work, wasn’t part of the equation for divers; it was all about the outcome. Interestingly, the study suggested that the divers might have spent more time thinking about the future than the thrivers, but their goals didn’t positively impact subsequent behaviour.
What else did the study discover? The researchers found that effortplayed a significant role in success, perhaps the most significant. Divers worked less hard than thrivers. ‘Overall,’ the study concludes, ‘our findings suggest that effort (study hours) … is the key predictor to an exceptionally successful transition to college’ (p. 17). Quite simply, thrivers were ‘willing to study more hours per week to obtain the higher GPA [grade point average] they expect’ (p. 21).
A student’s ability to organise their time emerged as essential. Divers’ systemsfor managing time and attention weren’t as strong; so much so that they took much longer to submit their data back at the start of the academic year. Despite being fresh at university and no doubt eager to get off to a good start, they used the two weeks they’d been given to complete the questionnaires poorly and tended towards filling them in at the last minute. Their written responses had far higher incidences of words like ‘procrastinate’ and ‘all-nighter’ (p. 13).
The way students revised – their practice– played an important role too. Divers ‘self-report cramming for exams’ (p. 20), which suggests a set of approaches that emphasise the importance of quick, surface-level retention of material rather than steady, strategic year-long learning.
Finally, there were a series of attitudinaltraits that emerged in written answers which suggested a difference between divers and thrivers. ‘Discipline’ was a descriptor thrivers used more often of themselves, as was ‘responsibility,’ and, interestingly, ‘practice’ – all words, the researchers conclude, ‘which are indicative of conscientiousness’ (p. 17).
They might have been conducting their study 3,500 miles away from us, and in a very different context, but if the researchers had wanted to find evidence of the five VESPA characteristics being predictors of academic 7success, they couldn’t have done a much better job.
It’s strange to think that we didn’t know of this study at the time. In fact, we only came across it in 2020, six years after we’d developed the VESPA model and some years after we’d begun writing about it, beginning with TheALevelMindsetin 2016, and followed by TheGCSEMindsetin 2017 and TheStudentMindsetin 2018.
Even now, we feel a strange kinship with Beattie, Laliberté and Oreopoulos. Now and again, we’ll check in with their Google scholar pages to see how they’re getting on.
Embarrassing but true.
Using this book
This could be the first time you’ve read anything about the VESPA model – and that’s fine. Or this might be the fourth book you’ve bought exploring the VESPA model – that’s fine too.
The materials we include here are all entirely new and all written post-COVID-19. There are no activities that also appear in TheALevelMindset, TheGCSEMindsetor TheStudentMindset, and no activities that depend on the reading of those books to work effectively. If you’re here for the first time, consider this as good an introduction to our work as any other book; and if you enjoy delivering the activities here, you’ve got just over eighty others waiting for you in our earlier publications. If you know the first eighty-or-so activities back to front, think of TheVESPAHandbookas an expansion pack – forty new resources to play with.
Although our previous books have been distinguished by activities specifically attached to key stages, that isn’t the case here. In our own classroom practice, since the publication of our books, we’ve found ourselves using the activities we enjoy the most and that, personally, we’ve found had the greatest impact with students regardless of their key stage. So, we’ve liberated you from that concept in this collection.
If you’re a head of Year 9 wanting a curriculum of tutorial study to prepare students for their GCSE years, this book is for you. If you’re a head of Year 11 looking for a series of resources that focus attention and encourage a greater commitment to out-of-class study, this book is for you. If you’re a head of sixth form looking to improve the levels of proactive independent learning in your Year 13 cohort – well, you get the idea. Assistant heads charged with improving learning outcomes at particular key stages might get something from the material here, as might deputy heads keen to strengthen pastoral support or teaching and learning. We hope there’s value here for as many of you as possible.8
Each of the five main chapters of the book will take you through an element of the VESPA model. We’ve structured these chapters in the same way each time: first, we define what we mean by the element and then describe what we might see when it’s lacking in learners. After that, we give you a brief overview of some of the most interesting research attached to the element and a summary of the findings. Finally – and perhaps most importantly – we give you a list of the behaviours that we see in students who have a strength in that area. We’ve collected these through interviews with students and teachers, and we’ve ensured that they’re replicable. So, when you’re supporting students, you can suggest – or have them pick – the behaviours you or they think they can incorporate into their studies.
Then we dive into the activities. There are eight for each of the VESPA headings, so forty in total. We have designed them to take about twenty or thirty minutes to deliver. Not all of them will suit your tastes, preferences or context, and that’s completely normal; some will strike you as useful (we hope!), others might not. Some you might envisage delivering to large numbers of students via an assembly; others will strike you as deliverable to a tutor group or class; still others might look like they’ll work in a seminar or coaching setting. We’ve tried to cover all bases, so pick and choose.
After the forty activities, we take you through a chapter on curriculum design. Some of you will consider the activities best suited to developing metacognition through tutorial programmes. That’s certainly how we’ve used them, and the mini schemes of work we’ve designed all assume a pastoral context for delivery. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way; some of our curricula would work just as well delivered in twenty-minute bursts in a classroom context. If that’s the lens through which you see the material here, that’s OK as well. We’ve spoken with staff who use the VESPA resources as a first-aid kit: when an issue arises in their class (a number of students miss a deadline, for example, or a posse stay behind to claim they don’t know how to revise), the activities are ready and waiting to be delivered. Both approaches work – it will be what you’re trying to achieve, and on what scale, that will determine how you use the material.
And, of course, you don’t have to use our curriculum designs at all. Every organisation is different: some place an emphasis on systems, others feel their students need a big dose of vision. There’s no requirement to balance out delivery so that every aspect of the model gets equal airtime, and there’s certainly no obligation to approach each element of the model separately and in acronym order. When we’re designing schemes, we’ll often assess what we want 9to get out of a particular period of time – what messages we want to communicate, what ideas we want in the ether, what conversations and reflections we want our students to have – and then build something that helps us get there. You could ignore our suggestions and do the same!
We finish the book with a chapter exploring the power of the VESPA questionnaire. Thousands upon thousands of students have taken the psychometric test since it was first developed; it gives both students and staff a useful starting point for reflection and discussion about the role metacognitive skills play in the learning process. Coaching conversations are quickly elevated when both coach and coachee can refer to the reports generated by the questionnaire software. We provide some examples of what these reports look like and hear from five leaders who use the online psychometric questionnaire and associated resources to support their students.
Lastly, in the conclusion, we continue a tradition begun in our first book and followed in the others, by drawing together the main strands and concepts we’ve discussed in ten concluding observations.
So, whatever it is that interests you, whatever change you’re trying to make and whatever ambitions you have for your learners, we think that there will be something useful for you here.
Good luck with your project!
* See https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2023/world-ranking.
1. Vision
If you have high control over the outcome, there’s no need to have general goals – you can afford to get specific. But if you have low control over the outcome, general might be better.
Vision: the level of goal awareness and goal orientation shown by a student; their growing understanding of their reasons for studying, and their developing sense of what success might look like for them.
WhatDoWeSeeWhenVisionisLow?
Like any of the metacognitive characteristics in the VESPA model, vision is not a fixed, unwavering element of personality. We can’t dismiss low-vision students as permanently impossible to motivate. Students’ levels of vision, goal orientation or dedication are malleable. They change in response to circumstances, culture, events in personal or family life, conversations, sudden epiphanies or exciting lessons.
When vision is missing, we’ll see proxies for it that might include some or all of the following behaviours. Students might seem disengaged or bored. They might have little awareness or understanding of why education benefits them or what success might look like for them. They may have few or no ideas about how education opens doors to 12certain careers, or they might have no access to alumni programmes which clearly and persuasively show them where last year’s students ended up. They might have begun to feel exasperated with themselves and others, envious of those who seem dedicated and feel the first tremors of a growing anxiety: what am I doing this for? Why are others enjoying this and I’m not? Is there something wrong with me? They might be firm believers in the passion myth; since they don’t yet know that passion for something arrives as a result of growing mastery, they hunt around, convinced that if they could just find the one thing they’re passionate about, everything will be OK again.
It’s a complicated cocktail of difficult feelings. But we can help low-vision students navigate themselves through them.
ResearchSpotlight:WhattheEvidenceIndicates
Let’s focus on one important element of vision: goal setting. Evidence for goals positively impacting on performance is interesting to explore because not all research finds that students who set goals necessarily perform better.
For example, studies with young primary school pupils sometimes find little impact from goal setting, which we might expect when we consider their only gradually developing ability to defer gratification. But even with students of high school age, the research isn’t unequivocal. One of the reasons could be the type of goal students set. For a quick – and, it’s important to note, hugely simplified – summary of just some of the different types of goals students often set themselves, consider the following list. (The labels are all used in the literature around goal setting, but the student quotes and the order in which the types of goal are presented are ours.)
Achievement goals focus on seeking a positive outcome:
Performance goals: ‘I want to be the best in the class. If not, I want to be at least in the top three or beat a particular individual.’Mastery goals: ‘I’m aiming to demonstrate an improvement in my ability to execute on this particular skill, which I’ve been reflecting on, tracking and practising.’Do-best goals: ‘Regardless of the outcome, I want to feel as if I’ve done myself justice and feel a sense of satisfaction.’Challenge-seeking goals/personal bests: ‘I know how I tend to perform in these situations and I have data to evidence where I’m up to. I’m aiming to use feedback, reflection and practice to achieve my highest score yet.’13Avoidance goals focus on averting a negative outcome:
Performance-avoidance goals: ‘I want to perform anonymously so that I don’t stand out as in any way incompetent.’Mastery-avoidance goals: ‘I know there’s a specific way I tend to mess this up. I’m focusing on avoiding that error in my execution.’Failure-avoidance goals: ‘I know what the pass mark is. I’m going to go into the exam focused on that, and just make sure I get over the line.’Simply assessing these seven approaches to goal setting might have us thinking of specific students we’ve taught in the past. We might also have experience-based ideas about which goals are likely to positively impact on academic performance and which aren’t. In case you’re wondering, the research is constantly developing as more goal types are added to models. Two academics from the University of Lausanne summarise one aspect helpfully for us: ‘Consistently in achievement goal research, pursuing performance-avoidance goals has been associated with a decrease in achievement’ (Świątkowski and Dompnier, 2021, p. 1).
