Student Achievement Goals in the Signals and Systems Course

This Research-to-Practice Work-in-Progress paper focuses on exploring student achievement goals. Achievement goals play an important role in student learning, as they affect multiple learning outcomes, including achievement, effort, and persistence. These effects, however, tend to differ depending on how goals are conceptualized and in which context they are applied. In this study, we used a person-centered approach to analyze how students can be categorized in terms of their goals in the context of an Introduction to Signals and Systems course. To conceptualize student goals, we expanded existing frameworks to include approach/avoidance, mastery/performance, and task/self/other dimensions. Through cluster analysis, we identified two types of students: (1) students all of whose goals are strong and (2) students whose task- and self-related, but not other-related, goals are strong. Further, we conducted a follow-up analysis to examine potential differences between the two clusters in achievement, effort, and persistence. Results showed that students in Cluster 2 scored higher on some achievement measures than students in Cluster 1. However, no differences were found on other achievement measures, as well as in effort or persistence. Future research may consider exploring potential reasons for these results and replicating our study to confirm the cluster structure.