Postdoctoral Fellowship: STEMEdIPRF: Constructing a model and a measure of students' goal orientation in undergraduate chemistry courses

Research indicates that underrepresented students in large introductory STEM courses encounter greater difficulties, such as higher dropout rates and lower grades, compared to their peers from more represented backgrounds, despite prior academic experiences. Studies highlight emotional factors contributing to these disparities, with goal orientation being a significant factor influencing academic performance and persistence.

Goal orientation refers to students’ reasons for engaging within a learning environment. Within chemistry courses, there is limited understanding of how goal orientation specifically relates to students’ performance and persistence. Therefore, this project aims to characterize chemistry-specific academic goals and develop a measure of chemistry students’ goal orientation.

Once developed, the Chemistry-specific Goal Orientation (CGO) measure will inform instructor understanding of the impact of pedagogies and course structure on student goals; subsequently allowing for evidence-based support for effective goal behaviors in chemistry classrooms. The CGO measure would also allow instructors to quantify and evaluate changes in students’ goal orientation and relate them to other student outcomes such as their learning, persistence, or emotions.

Thus, it is likely that efforts towards improving these outcomes would lead to the retention of more STEM majors.

Goal orientation can be conceptualized as ‘mastery’ or ‘performance’ based, with mastery-goals being more predictive of interest and continued motivation leading to positive relations with persistence and positive emotions. On the other hand, performance-goals are related to negative outcomes like low self-efficacy, anxiety, avoidance of help-seeking, self-handicapping strategies, and low performance.

Within the field of chemistry education, there is currently sparse work investigating the role of students’ goal orientation on achievement outcomes. The few studies that do investigate goal orientation focus on use of the Academic Goal Questionnaire (AGQ) and its different versions, to measure goal orientation. However, these studies find mixed results regarding the psychometric evidence that supports the data generated with the AGQ.

To better understand goal orientation, this project first seeks to recontextualize the construct within chemistry. This starts with interviews that discuss how students engage with learning tasks in the chemistry course. A qualitative content analysis will be conducted to extract a model of chemistry students’ goal orientation.

From there, an iterative instrument development process will begin with item writing, cognitive interviewing, item editing, and psychometric evaluation until a final version of the CGO measure has been developed. The outcomes of this project will provide instructors and researchers the ability to produce data about students’ goal orientations that is supported by substantial evidence of validity and reliability.

This project is supported by NSF’s STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (STEM Ed PRF) Program. The STEM Ed PRF Program aims to enhance the research knowledge, skills, and practices of recent doctorates in STEM, STEM education, education, and related disciplines to advance their preparation to engage in fundamental and applied research that advances knowledge within the field.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.