Learning Goals and Progress Feedback During Reading Comprehension Instruction

This experiment investigated the effects of goals and goal progress feedback on reading comprehension selfefficacy and skill. Remedial readers received comprehension strategy instruction on finding main ideas, Some subjects were provided a product goal of answering questions, others were given a process goal of learning to use the strategy, and subjects in a third condition received process goals combined with feedback on goal progress. The condition receiving process goals and progress feedback demonstrated significantly higher performance on the self-efficacy and skill tests than the process goal and product goal conditions, which did not differ. Subjects assigned to the process goal and process goal plus feedback conditions judged perceived progress in strategy learning higher than product goal subjects. These results show that remedial readers benefit from explicit feedback on their mastery of a comprehension strategy and have implications for comprehension instruction. Article: The present investigation represents a follow-up study to an experiment by Schunk and Rice (1989), which explored the effects of goal setting on students' achievement outcomes during reading comprehension instruction. The conceptual focus was theory and research showing that goal setting, which involves establishing a standard for performance, represents an important source of motivation (Bandura. 1988; Locke & Latham, 1990; Locke, Shaw, Saari, & Latham, 1981). When individuals make a commitment to attempt to attain a designated standard, they are likely to sustain their efforts until they achieve that standard. Given that children are limited in their capacity to cognitively represent complex goals in thought, short-term goals that incorporate specific performance standards lead ,to higher performance than do temporally distant goals, general goals (e.g., "Do your best"), or no goals (Bandura & Schunk, 1981; Schunk, 1989, 1990; Tollefson, Tracy, Johnsen, Farmer, & Buenning, 1984). The effects of goals on behavior presumably depend in part on perceived self-efficacy, or personal beliefs about one's capabilities to organize and implement actions necessary to attain designated performance levels (Bandura, 1986, 1988). Self-efficacy affects choice of activities, effort expended, persistence, and achievement. Students with low self-efficacy for accomplishing a task may avoid it; those who believe they are capable should engage more readily. Especially when facing obstacles, learners with high self-efficacy ought to work harder, persist longer, and achieve at a higher level, than those who doubt their capabilities, Individuals acquire self-efficacy information from their performances, vicarious (observational) experiences, forms of persuasion, and physiological indexes (e.g., sweating, heart rate). Research shows that self-efficacy can influence students' motivation and learning in various domains (Schunk, 1989, 1990). When students are given or establish a goal, they may experience a sense of self-efficacy for attaining it (Bandura, 1988; Schunk, 1989). As they pursue a goal. they are apt to engage in activities they believe will help them attain it; for example, they are likely to attend to instruction, rehearse information to be remembered, and persist at the task, all of which increase on-task behaviors and achievement. Students' initial sense of selfefficacy is substantiated as they work on the task and observe goal progress because the perception of progress conveys they are becoming skillful (Elliott & Dweck, 1988). Heightened self-efficacy can sustain motivation and lead learners to establish new goals when they master their present ones. In the absence of a learning goal, students may be less motivated to work diligently and less sure of their capabilities because they lack standards against which to gauge progress. These self-doubts can interfere with skill acquisition (Licht & Kistner, 1986). A distinction sometimes is drawn between product goals, which concern what students should know or be able to accomplish as a result of learning, and process goals that focus on techniques and strategies students can use to promote learning (Weinstein & Mayer, 1986). Most goal-setting research has employed product goals (e.g., quantity of work to be completed), but educational researchers and practitioners increasingly are advocating teaching students learning strategies, or systematic plans for improving encoding of information and performance (Mayer, 1988; Paris, Lipson, & Wixson, 1983). In this view, strategies are processes used by students to attain such products as correct answers, high test scores, and good grades. This process-product goal distinction is somewhat artificial because strategies also are products of educational interventions in which they are taught to students. We use the terms product and process in this article because the strategy was designed to be a process for attaining the product of better comprehension. Schunk and Rice (1989) taught remedial readers a comprehension strategy for finding main ideas. Some received a product goal of correctly answering comprehension questions; others were given a process goal of learning the strategy; control students were given a general goal of working productively. It was expected that each specific goal would promote self-efficacy and skills better than the general goal. Pursuing a specific goal allows students to compare their performances against the goal to determine progress, and the perception of progress enhances self-efficacy, motivation, and skill acquisition. With a general goal, learners might wonder whether they were making progress, which does not raise self-efficacy. Schunk and Rice also hypothesized that the process goal would promote achievement outcomes better than the product goal. Emphasizing the strategy should lead students to view it as an important means for improving comprehension. Students who believe they have learned a useful strategy may feel they have greater control over their learning, which raises self-efficacy (Schunk, 1989). Perceived strategy usefulness can lead learners to apply the strategy diligently, which enhances skill acquisition and retention. Students' use of effective learning strategies bears a positive relation to self-efficacy (Pintrich & De Groot, )990; Zimmerman & Martinez-Pons, 1990). Emphasizing a product goal might lead students to perceive the strategy as less important to their successes than other factors (e.g., time available, ability). Learners who believe a strategy does not contribute much may not employ it systematically or feel efficacious about improving their skills (Fabricius & Hagen, 1984; Paris, Newman, & McVey, 1982; Ringel & Springer, 1980). These considerations are especially relevant to remedial readers, who often believe they have little control over academic outcomes and doubt their capabilities (Butkowsky & Willows, 1980). Process and product goals led to higher self-efficacy than the control treatment and process goal students demonstrated higher comprehension skill than the controls, but there was no difference between process and product goals on self-efficacy or skill. Schunk and Rice (1989) noted that, because the process and product goals were short term and specific, they may have raised students' sense of self-efficacy for learning, which was substantiated as they successfully worked on the task. It also is possible that process goal students had difficulty determining whether they were making progress learning the strategy and whether strategy use was enhancing their performances. During the instruction, all students received feedback on the accuracy of their answers to comprehension questions, but process goal students never were given feedback on how well they were learning the strategy or that strategy use was improving their performances. They may have gauged self-efficacy using the same criterion employed by product goal learners—how well they were answering questions. Greater benefits of process goals might have been obtained had students been given progress feedback. Telling students they are leaning the strategy informs them of progress and implies that the strategy is helping them answer questions. Such explicit feedback has beneficial effects on medial readers' self-efficacy and skills (Schunk & Rice, 1987). In this study, we replicated the Schunk and Rice (1989) methodology except we replaced the control condition with one in which students received the process goal combined with feedback on their progress in learning the strategy and applying it to answer questions. We expected that the product and process goal conditions would not differ, but that students who received process goals and progress feed-back would demonstrate the highest perceived progress in learning, self-efficacy, and skill.