A variable that may be associated with performance improvements is goal setting (within and across days). Easy-to-achieve goals will likely produce gradual trends in improvement and difficult-to-achieve goals steeper trends. The purpose of the current experiments was to study the effects of setting easy-to-achieve and difficult-to-achieve goals on the level, trend, and variability of correct, incorrect, and skip responses for math tasks when reinforcement contingencies and numbers of practices were held constant. Five undergraduate students answered math problems on flash cards in 30s timings. Single case design elements were used to evaluate the effects of different types of goals on the speed and accuracy of performance. The results revealed that goal setting primarily increased the frequency of incorrect responses and both the level and trend of skip responses. The implications of these findings and other important variables that influence the effectiveness of goal setting are discussed. In addition, the authors suggest guidelines to follow when implementing goals to improve performance.

Syfte: Studien syftar till att undersöka hur försäkringsbolag X arbetar med målstyrning samt hur den upplevs av rådgivarna. Vidare syftar den även till att analysera hur de externa restriktionerna påverkar försäkringsbranschens målstyrningsarbete.    Frågeställning: Hur arbetar försäkringsbolag X med målstyrning utifrån de externa  restriktionerna samt hur upplevs de uppsatta målen av rådgivarna?   Metod: Studien har utgångspunkt i kvalitativ metod med en deduktiv ansats.  Den genomförda studien är en fallstudie, där ett försäkringsbolag har studerats. Respondenterna inom försäkringsbolaget innefattas av VD, affärsområdeschef, försäljningschef samt rådgivare.   Slutsats: Utifrån studien kan vi konstatera en avsaknad av anpassad målstyrning utformad specifikt för försäkringsbranschen. Försäkringsbolag X har anpassat sin målstyrning utifrån restriktionerna genom att inte använda några belöningar och således har ett viktigt steg i målstyrningen försvunnit. Vidare kan vi även konstatera vikten av inflytande vid målformulering, vikten av strukturell feedback samt mål anpassade efter kompetensnivå. / Purpose: The study aims to investigate how Insurance company X works with goal management and how it is experienced by the advisers. Furthermore, it also aims to demonstrate how external restrictions affect the insurance industry's goal management.   Research question: How does Insurance company X work with goal management based on the external restrictions and how are these goals experienced by the advisers?     Methodology: The study is based on qualitative method with deductive approach. The completed study is a case study, where an insurance company has been studied. The respondents are included by the CEO, business area manager, sales manager and advisers.   Conclusion: Our conclusion is that there is no customized goal management designed specifically for insurance companies. Insurance company X has adapted its goal management from the restrictions by not using any rewards. By that, an important step in the goal management has disappeared. Furthermore, our conclusions show the importance of influence on goal setting, the importance of structural feedback and goals adapted to competence.

AbstractThe aim of this study is to illustrate, discuss and problematize goal-aiming in preschool practice. The study focus on the didactic work of preschool teachers, at a practice action level that includes planning and action. The study could be considered important in times of changes in the context of preschool education with high expectations on the performance of preschools and preschool teachers. The process has been explorative with a hermeneutic approach and the result of the study has emerged in the interaction between preunderstanding, data, theories and new understanding.The study has a critical didactic approach with focus on what may occur as multiple understandings of curriculum goal aiming at a practice action level. The data consist of seven preschool teachers’ narratives about their goal aiming work and the research questions are: •Which different ways to do goal-aiming at a didactic action level occurs in the narratives of preschool teachers?•Which different aspects of complexity in relation to goal-aiming occurs in the narratives of preschool teachers?•Which different norm didactic and critical didactic ideas about goal-aiming occurs in the narratives of preschool teachers?Four different ways of goal-aiming occurs at a didactic action level: pre goal-aiming, post goal-aiming, present goal-aiming, child goal-aiming and environmental goal-aiming. The goal-aiming actions can be understood in the form of a process and emerge like goal-aiming chains.Three different complexity aspects are identified: goal-complexity, learning-complexity and individual-complexity and are being discussed in the result chapter.Norm didactic ideas and critical didactic ideas emerge from the narratives at the same time, which can be understood as multiple understanding. The norm didactic believes emerge in the context of evaluation and the critical didactic believes emerge in goal- aiming action level considering planning and teaching.

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The thesis aims at developing new, alternative approaches and methods based on suggestions and ideas originating from moral philosophy and philosophical decision theory. More precisely, the thesis aims at investigating the rationality of transport policy decisions, including goal-setting and performance evaluation. Paper I discusses rationality in road safety policy. Problematic features are identified and discussed. The paper argues that the Swedish road safety goal is rational, since it is action-guiding and achievement-inducing. This follows by observing that the goal satisfies the criteria of precision, evaluability, approachability, and motivity. The paper states that previous accusations of irrationality have been unnecessarily imprecise, since no reference is made to independently developed criteria of rational goal-setting. Paper II discusses the Swedish transport policy goals, and the role of social welfare in rational policy decisions. Goals often come into conflict and trade-offs must be rationally and consistently managed. Policy decisions are outcomes of political processes. In the case of policy goals and decisions, the agent is society. This introduces the problematic concept of social welfare, which itself is an ambiguous goal with many meanings. Whether a decision is rational or not depends on whose perspective one takes on – that of society as a whole or that of the actual decision makers. Paper III aims at investigating six different procedures for resolving goal conflicts: weighted average, lexicographic preference, conditional lexicographic preference, absolute restriction, generalised prioritarianism, and partial comparability. Criteria for selection, according to the respective procedures, are formulated and summarised in a table. The six procedures are contrasted with respect to their tendency to rule out possible sets of alternatives as being not choiceworthy. / QC 20101123

This study was conducted to determine if visualized goal achievement can help enhance East Asian Chinese students‟ motivation in learning and elevate their confidence in reaching their goals thus improving their performance. The goal achievement was visualized on a goal achievement progress chart that was self-created and self-managed by the East Asian Chinese students and the goal creating was under the supervision of their instructor. In this study, literature reviews on the theories, previous research studies in the perspectives of East Asian students‟ motivation in learning, goal setting on motivation, self-determination, self-efficacy, and expectancy theories are conducted to provide theoretical ground and legitimate evidence for this particular research. The researcher conducted an experiment in which students were given a learning task and required to set their own learning goals for that learning task under the supervision of their instructors. In this specific experiment, a total of 106 students from a university that was funded by American Educators in a central province in China agreed to participate in stages one, and two of the study, but some students withdrew from this research and some did not participate in both research stages therefore their data were take out from the data to make research result more consistent. Therefore eventually 72 students were considered eligible to go through the whole process of turning in the questionnaires and participating in the performance test. In this particular goal setting research study, the students were given the freedom of setting their own learning pace iii and managing their own progress on a visualized progress chart. The progress chart was visualized as a climbing/progressing line, which goes from bottom to top (see appendix C) once students achieved their learning goals. At the same time, the instructor provided feedback concerning the students‟ progress. Although some of the research results displayed no statistical significance for motivation and self-confidence during the pre and post session of the research, there is a positive correlation among motivation, self-confidence, and performance outcome. One research result did corroborate the previous research study that goal setting strategy would improve learning outcome.

Do the factors that help students attain desirable outcomes in university transfer to help them attain desirable outcomes upon work entry? The overarching goal of this dissertation is to examine the role of coping in helping university students and recent graduates maintain positive levels of achievement and psychological adjustment during the short- and long-term pursuit of their academic and career goals. Based on the extant literature on stress and coping, three studies document the achievement and psychological adjustment of young adults along theoretically relevant time points in their academic and career development. Study 1 builds on prior findings from Chamandy and Gaudreau (2019) by bridging the academic and career strivings of 550 university students across two examination periods to consider the domain specificity and changing nature of the coping process. We first examined the contemporaneous interplay between perceived control, coping, goal progress, and burnout in both the academic and career domains. We then examined if these patterns translated at the longitudinal level. Results indicated that earlier coping predicted change in goal progress, but not in burnout, in both domains. In the career domain, earlier goal progress also predicted change in task-oriented coping, thus revealing a bidirectional effect. No cross-domain effects were supported. Overall, the associations between coping, goal progress, and burnout differed both within and across time and contexts. Study 2 re-examined these associations among employees who had recently gone through the transition to work. In a two-wave longitudinal study, a sample of 153 recent graduates completed measures of appraisal, coping, goal progress, satisfaction, and burnout while retrospectively assessing their past experiences as university students and their current experiences at work. Results indicated that task-oriented coping in school was related to greater change in goal progress and satisfaction from school to work, whereas disengagement-oriented coping was related to greater change in burnout and to lower change in satisfaction. In turn, change in task-oriented coping was related to lower work burnout, whereas change in disengagement-oriented coping was related to greater change in work burnout and to lower change in work satisfaction. The findings also revealed bidirectional effects across school and work. Finally, graduation grades were shown to be useful but insufficient for our understanding of successful adaptation in the workplace, thus proving new insights on the psychological mechanisms involved in both the successful transition from university to work and the short-term adaptation of recent graduates at work. Study 3 takes a novel perspective on the experience of university students by testing a coping intervention involving hypothetic impediments to the pursuit of their career goals. In a two-wave randomized controlled study, 275 university students completed measures of transition-related controllability appraisals and school-related coping, satisfaction, burnout, and goal progress. The experimental condition elicited self-regulatory benefits by demonstrating group differences in the growth, decline, and follow-up levels, as well as in some of the associations between the intercepts and slopes of controllability appraisals, coping, satisfaction, and burnout. These findings indicate that a coping intervention can improve students’ perception of the transition to work and promote a more positive university experience. This thesis provided new knowledge on the role of coping in offering an advantage to university students on the job market beyond its role in facilitating goal progress and psychological adjustment. Our work opens the door to a long-term research agenda deemed necessary for practitioners and administrators with regards to the role of coping processes in the lives of university students during and beyond their post-secondary education. As a whole, the current dissertation makes theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to the coping and transition literature in social, educational, and organizational psychology.

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