Help Students Set Goals Hot

From site:  An ancient Chinese proverb notes that no wind is favorable if one does not know to which port one is sailing. Goals provide a standard against which students can gauge their progress, and setting goals can have a substantial impact on student self-efficacy and achievement.

Setting and measuring goals is probably the most effective classroom modification teachers can make to increase student confidence. When students achieve short-term goals, they gain an initial sense of self-efficacy for performing well, which is later substantiated as they observe progress toward longer-term goals.

Goals are effective in two ways. First, they give directions for a student’s effort. Second, they provide a way to measure, and thus draw attention to, previous achievement. As mentioned earlier, past performance is the strongest indicator of self-efficacy, and helping students set, measure, and record achieved goals draws their attention to their past performance.