When students struggle in class, there is a tendency for faculty to attribute it to a lack of ability, motivation, or both. For some students, however, there is a third possibility. Maintaining effort toward achieving goals can be short-circuited by a breakdown in a person’s cognitive control system called state-orientation. I recently published a paper in Frontiers in Education with colleagues Chris Ferekides, Chung Seop Jeong, Joel Howell, and Ismail Uysal about an intervention to help students overcome state-orientation.
Action-State Orientation and Academic Success
Action-state orientation concerns the cognitive processes through which individuals maintain effort toward their goals. Action oriented people are able to formulate plans to meet a goal and then execute those plans. State-oriented people might have the same goals and plans, but the execution breaks down. They have trouble starting and procrastinate, they get distracted and fail to return to the task, and they struggle to maintain effort. Such individuals might be motivated to achieve their goals, but the state-orientation gets in the way. What they need are strategies to help them execute plans, and that is what our research set out to provide.
Help Students Overcome State-Orientation
Our team at the University of South Florida was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to improve education of electrical engineering undergraduates. One of our projects was to develop an intervention, based on the action-state orientation concept, to improve student success. We created both a face-to-face version that is delivered by faculty in class, and we developed a self-paced online mini-course maximizing your study potential that is available online. Our approach was to focus on barriers for state-oriented students and devise strategies to help overcome them. The online course has modules for five strategies.
- Using Mini-Goals. We reasoned that procrastination will be less if a student breaks up a large task into small and more manageable bites, for example reading 6 pages of a textbook rather than a whole chapter. This will also make it easier to maintain effort and capitalize on the goal gradient effect–the burst of energy when you are close to completing a goal.
- Avoiding Distractions. Since state-oriented individuals are easily distracted, avoiding things that distract is key. Simple strategies are turning off cell phones and asking friends not to call during study time.
- Spacing Learning. Studying something in small chunks spaced over time is more effective than cramming material all at once. This strategy, related to mini-goals, is to spread studying over time and do a little each day.
- Structuring Time. This is a strategy that helped me in school. At the beginning of each semester I would make a schedule of when key things needed to be accomplished such as reading chapters and writing papers. For state-oriented people, each thing would be a small chunk that can be accomplished fairly quickly.
- Social Commitment. This strategy relies on friends or family members to help keep you accountable by announcing something you plan to accomplish.
These strategies work in concert to help maintain effort toward goals. Although they can be helpful for anyone, they are likely to be particularly helpful for state-oriented people who struggle to get things done.
Is the Course Effective?
Our paper details research with both the in-class and online versions of the intervention. We conducted two studies. In the first, we surveyed engineering students who experienced the intervention to evaluate effectiveness against the four Kirkpatrick criteria. Results showed effectiveness on all four:
- Reactions: We included three items asking if they found the course of value.
- Learning: There was a five-item knowledge test about action-state orientation.
- Behavior: We asked how much students used each of the strategies.
- Results: Students rated how effective the strategies were.
The second study compared those who experienced the intervention with those who did not. Although for a few of the strategies showed no differences (e.g., turning off cell phones while studying), those experiencing the intervention did more of the strategies and used them more frequently. Overall, our research provided evidence that our intervention could help students overcome state-orientation. Of course, further work is needed to see if it resulted in better grades.
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