Enhancing Goal Setting Skills by Using Goal-Directed Peer Feedback

Abstract

As more employers expect their employees to be self-directed and self-controlled, it becomes more crucial for vocational education to provide students with the necessary skills to succeed in the workplace. One of these skills is self-regulated learning (SRL), although this might be challenging for some students, studies have shown that feedback plays a crucial role in enhancing these SRL skills. A quasi-experimental quantitative research design was used to investigate whether goal-directed peer feedback can improve students’ goal setting skills. A control condition and experimental condition was set up to measure whether goal-directed feedback improved students’ goal setting skills in terms of goal setting, goal content and goal attainment. Students set goals every week and could formulate new goals or revise them. Additionally, we measured students’ goal setting skills in a pre- and post-test by means of a goal setting questionnaire and scored the quality of goals with a SMART-goal rubric. Results of the mixed-design ANOVA show that students who received goal-directed feedback did not show improvement on goal setting skills, goal content and goal attainment in comparison with students who did not receive goal-directed peer feedback.