Students' Social Goals and Outcomes

Abstract Social goals are cognitive representations of desired social outcomes that have an impact in academics. Social goals have been linked to motivation and performance in young students. However, the role of social goals in college student achievement needs to be addressed. An instrument was created to measure social goals of college students. Seven types of social goals were identified and correlated with the learning engagement outcomes of peer learning, help-seeking, and effort regulation. Some of the social goals had significant relationships with the outcomes. Introduction There are many reasons for students' behaviors and some reasons are socially oriented. The social aspects of academics (e.g., interacting with other students) can be a part of students' motivations. In motivation research, social goals are addressed to understand students' social behaviors. Social goals are cognitive representations of desired social outcomes that have an impact in academics (Urdan & Maehr, 1995). Social goals have only been addressed in limited populations (e.g., children and adolescents). Older populations (e.g., college students) should be studied (Urdan & Maehr). Unlike previous research, the present article examines social goal pursuit of college students. Background on Social Goals Multiple researchers have differing conceptualizations of social goals. Described here are multiple types of social goals studied and the outcomes to which they are linked. Each of the researchers addressed have focused only on children and adolescents. Although younger students are addressed in this literature, it serves as a basis and a framework for the present article. In younger populations, social goal pursuit accounts for some variation in academic achievement outcomes. Investigations of specific achievement correlates of social goal pursuit were revealed during the 1990's (e.g., Anderman & Anderman, 1999; Miller et al., 1996; Wentzel, 1996) and early this century (e.g., Dowson & McInerney, 2003). The earliest work on social goals comes from Wentzel. Wentzel (1994) measured two dimensions of social goals: prosocial and social responsibility. Each of the dimensions was measured in two subparts: academic and peer. Academic prosocial goals involved sharing and helping peers with academic problems, whereas personal prosocial goals entailed sharing and helping peers with social problems. Typically, Wentzel uses peers' judgements of these behaviors. The academic side of the social responsibility dimension reflected following classroom rules, whereas the peer side meant keeping promises and commitments to peers. These dimensions of social goals reflected most of Wentzel's work on the construct (i.e., Wentzel, 1994, 1996, 2002, 2003). In her research, prosocial and social responsibility goal pursuit were moderately to highly correlated with each other and with several other variables such as students' effort (Wentzel, 1994, 1996). In addition, GPA had a moderate to strong positive relationship with prosocial and social responsibility goals in middle school students (Wentzel, 1997, 1998). These correlations help describe the predictive worth of prosocial and social responsibility goals as measured by Wentzel adolescent populations. While Wentzel germinated the study of social goals in academics, additional researchers made meaningful contributions regarding the relationship between social goals and academic success. Miller et al. (1996) approached social goals differently than Wentzel. Their research with high school students included two social goals: trying to please others and trying to be socially responsible. After interpreting exploratory factor analytic findings, the researchers argued for and labeled two social goals: pleasing the teacher and pleasing the family. These variables were positively related to each other and had relationships with other variables. …