Improving Academic Performance Amongst First Years Computer Science Students Through Goal-Setting

Academic performance across Computer Science (CS) courses in the Republic of Ireland is underwhelming. CS undergraduates are statistically the most likely cohort in the country not to progress past year one of their studies. Insufficient motivation to pursue CS studies has been demonstrated to be a significant cause of poor CS academic performance. Goal-setting programs are an efficient, cost-effective, and student empowering way to boost motivation. Goal-setting is the formulation of a set of activities intended to motivate an individual to the desired goal state. This paper provides an experimental design for assessing the effectiveness of a written goal-setting program on academic performance concerning individual differences. Participants are randomly assigned either to the written goal-setting program or an active control task via an online platform. The goal-setting program requires participants to articulate both a desired future life and a feared future life. The program also requires participants to: identify goals and sub-goals across several domains (e.g. family, health, study); the benefits that achieving their goals would have for themselves for their connected group; the daily habits they could develop to make their ideal future more likely to occur. This study also investigates how personality (via a high-resolution personality model) and cognitive differences influence goal-setting effectiveness. Differences in both Semester 1 performance and the number of students who progress to Semester 2 are assessed between experimental groups. An ANCOVA analysis will assess whether the effectiveness of an experimental task varied based on individual differences in personality and/or cognitive ability.