Think of the last time you set yourself a goal. Perhaps you wanted to learn a new language, improve your fitness or reduce the time you spend working in the evening.

How successful were you? Are you now able to hold a conversation in Italian? Can you climb the stairs without feeling breathless? Have you managed to stop marking in front of the telly every night?

The answer to these questions will, to a large degree, be influenced by the type of goal you set. The difference between attaining a personal goal or failing miserably often comes down to the effectiveness of our goal-setting approach.

And the same is true of our students’ academic goals. If we want students to progress with their learning, we need to ensure they’re setting goals that make improvement more likely.

Why goal setting matters

Since the 1960s, research has associated goal setting with a wide range of academic benefits. Goal setting can boost intrinsic motivation, improve self-efficacy and help students to develop self-regulation.

In his 1990 overview, educational psychologist Dale Schunk explains that “when students perceive satisfactory goal progress, they feel capable of improving their skills; goal attainment, coupled with high self-efficacy, leads students to set new challenging goals”.

In other words, meeting academic goals creates a virtuous cycle, where progress leads to success and success leads to new, ambitious goals. Consequently, as researchers Edwin Locke and Gary Latham point out, effective goal setting is a powerful lever that teachers can pull to boost academic achievement.

Unfortunately, when left to their own devices, many students neglect to set any academic goals. Research shows that they tend to take a “hope for the best” approach, which invariably fails, leading to lower attainment and decreased wellbeing.

But even when students do set themselves academic goals, they tend to be less useful than they could be. Recently, Dutch researcher Gabrielle Martins van Jaarsveld and colleagues noted that “when left to set their own goals, students often do not set meaningful or effective academic goals”.

All too frequently, students set goals that focus on performance and outcomes. And, as we shall see, these are not as helpful as goals that focus on the learning process.

What kind of goal is the most effective?

In a recent systematic review into the effects of goal setting in sport, researcher Ollie Williamson and colleagues identified three popular goal types:

1. Outcome goals are focused on a desired result. For example, a darts player may set a goal of winning a tournament. These kinds of goals are very popular, as they focus on a tangible outcome. But outcome goals are very difficult to control, as they’re dependent on the performance of others.
2. Performance goals are based on an individual’s own standard. For example, a darts player might aim for three maximum scores of 180 in a match. Being personalised, performance goals are more controllable than outcome goals.
3. Process goals are much more granular in nature and are based on techniques used to improve performance. For example, a darts player may focus on practising wrist movements for a smoother dart release. For individuals, process goals are under their total control.

These goals act on a continuum. Process goals should lead to improved performance. And improved performance should lead to a better outcome. When setting goals, however, people often obsess about performance milestones or the result itself. Subsequently, outcome and performance goals are the most frequently adopted type of goal.

But are outcome and performance goals effective in helping us to achieve our aims?

For outcome goals, Williamson and colleagues found a very low effect size of 0.09. For performance goals, the effect size was a reasonable 0.44. Process goals, however, had a whoppingly significant effect size of 1.36. As a result, the researchers concluded that “process goals were more beneficial for increasing performance and self-efficacy than other goal types”.

What’s more, performance and outcome goals were found to carry other negative effects. In particular, the focus on outperforming others “generally reduced participants’ engagement with the task and increased anxiety symptoms”.

From a goal-setting viewpoint, defining ourselves against standards that we can’t control is demotivating, stress-inducing and reduces the chances of success.

How does goal setting apply to the classroom?

Obviously, there are big differences between sport and education. But research into goal setting in sport offers an interesting parallel to classroom practice.

Like a darts player striving for a competition victory, a student may set an outcome goal that involves outperforming their classmates; for example, to “get the highest mark in the class for this week’s maths test”.

While we may admire a student’s desire to aim high, this type of goal invariably inhibits long-term progress. In the same way that the darts player can do little to control competitors’ performance, the student also has little control over the mathematical prowess of their peers.

Setbacks - like finishing third in the maths test rankings - prove demoralising, even though, objectively, the student has done well. Little wonder that outcome goals like these demotivate and provoke anxiety.

As adults, we know the pitfalls of comparing ourselves unfavourably with others, and so teachers will commonly encourage students to set goals that focus only on their own performance. For example, “to improve on my test result of 92 per cent by getting a mark of over 95 per cent this time”.

Yet, despite being less detrimental than outcome goals, performance goals are still deeply problematic.

A five-year longitudinal study by Aleidine Moeller and colleagues found that performance goals “foster a pattern of motivation associated with failure avoidance… Students who use performance goals are focused on how they will be judged and attribute results to lack of ability”.

In other words, when students who set performance goals fail to meet their targets - like achieving 95 per cent in a class test - they are scarred by failure, their self-worth takes a hit and they lose confidence in their ability to succeed.

However, by setting the third type of goal - a process goal - the student focuses on a specific area for improvement that is: a) within their control; and b) avoids performance targets. For example, to “practise using sample space diagrams so I can accurately find the probability of combined events”.

Process goals are a type of mastery goal. And, as Moeller and colleagues point out, when students set goals that prioritise the process over the result, they become “oriented toward developing new skills, trying to understand their work, improving their level of competence or achieving a sense of mastery based on self-referenced standards”.

By setting process goals, students develop intrinsic motivation, which is associated with better academic outcomes. Indeed, a 2018 review of student goal setting by the American Institutes for Research found that students following mastery goals were “more likely to adopt challenging tasks [and] adopt more effective learning strategies”.

They also displayed “higher levels of cognitive engagement in academic tasks even when controlling for students’ academic ability levels”.

Should teachers set goals for students?

In summary, there are two important takeaways for teachers from goal-setting research.

First, many students don’t bother to set academic goals, instead adopting a “blind optimism” approach. Second, even when students do set goals, they generally use performance and outcome goals, which can have negative effects on their wellbeing and are less likely to help them make progress.

Given this knowledge, does that mean that teachers should be setting goals for their students instead?

Unfortunately, handing students ready-made goals may also backfire. When teachers provide goals for students, there tends to be a disconnect between the teacher’s “official” goal and the goal a student chooses to pursue.

Research suggests that when students are involved in setting goals, they feel more intrinsically motivated because, as Moeller points out, “they are taking a step toward reaching their own aspirations”.

American researcher Sara Sanders and colleagues agree that a collaborative approach is necessary, arguing that including students in goal setting, “even if the creation of the goal is guided by teacher suggestion”, helps to “increase student buy-in, motivation and overall growth” in the skill in question.

So, instead of leaving students to set their own ineffective goals or frustrating them with our “here’s one I made earlier” goals, we need to jointly discuss precise areas of weakness, enabling students to focus on the process.

Setting behaviour goals

Furthermore, the study by Sanders and colleagues is especially fascinating because it approaches goal setting from a behavioural, not just purely academic, angle. The researchers found that involving primary-aged pupils in the creation of behaviour goals helped to develop the acquisition of social and emotional learning skills.

By focusing on granular processes, like raising a hand before speaking, rather than performance goals, such as reducing the number of warnings they receive, pupils were more likely to modify their disruptive behaviour.

When it comes to goal setting, therefore, it’s vital to work closely with students to set specific goals that focus on process over outcome. Only then will students grasp that if we pay attention to the little things we need to work on, the grades (or, indeed, the behaviour issues) will take care of themselves.

Mark Roberts is an English teacher and director of research at Carrickfergus Grammar School. His new book, Fail better: how teachers can help students overcome failure, perfectionism, procrastination, impostor syndrome and test anxiety, will be published in January 2026

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