what is a process goal in education

Goal Getting

What are process goals (with examples).

Ready. Set. Go. For years, this was my three-step mindset when it came to goals. I would reach for the moon and hope to land among the stars without feeling the pain of the fall. This approach was all or nothing, and as a result, I experienced loads of burnout and almost zero productivity. In short, my task list was filled with high-level intentions, but I hadn’t taken the time to create a map to reach the destinations. I was lost in the planning stages because I didn’t understand process goals or have any examples to follow.

Since then, I’ve learned how to embrace the journey and break my outcome goals into smaller and more manageable process goals. This approach has improved my focus and reduced frustration because I’m now working towards a surefire strategy that will take me where I want to go––I’m creating a plan of action with achievable daily targets (a process goal).

Table of Contents

What is a process goal, what is a destination goal, process goal template, what questions helped me find my process goals, what are some process goals you can try, what do you need for process goals, final thoughts.

A process goal is not a destination, it’s the path you plan on taking to get there. For example, if you want to become better at writing, your process goal would be to post one blog article per week and learn from the feedback you receive. The destination is a monthly goal of 12 articles.

This distinction is important because it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that these types of goals are not all or nothing. Think about it. You’ve heard it said: it’s not about working hard but working smart.

Well, a process goal is an actionable target with what we call SMART criteria:

• Specific – The more detailed your goal, the better. For example, instead of “I want to be fit,” you would say, “I want to lose five pounds.” Make sure your goal is crystal clear.
• Measurable – You need a way to measure progress and success, so it needs to be quantifiable. This is where you decide what “fit” actually means for you (more on this later).
• Achievable – If your goal isn’t challenging, then it’s not going to be motivating. On the other hand, there must be a steeper mountain to climb if you want substantial results.
• Realistic – “I want to run a marathon” is not practical for most people. Ensure you have the time, energy, and resources (e.g., training program) required to achieve your goal.
• Time-Bound – Your goal needs an assigned deadline or it’s just a pipe dream. There’s nothing wrong with dreaming, but what happens when the fantasy ends?

To summarize, these are the essential components of any process goal: specific, measurable, achievable within a certain time frame, and realistic.

A destination goal is a point in time when you plan to be at a particular destination. For example, if your goal is to get to represent your country at the 2025 Summer Olympics, you right need to focus on smaller increments to attain that success. On your way to that goal, you need to focus on smaller destinations. First, make the national team. Then, compete in a few events and so forth.

If you try to make it to the Olympics from the very start without any milestones along the way, it would be too daunting. On the other hand, if you focus on each milestone as a destination goal, it will all seem possible and achievable.

Let’s say you want to become a better cook. Here is one way of writing the process goal: “I will save $100 per week by cooking all my meals at home for 12 weeks.” This would be your destination (monthly), and the steps required to achieve this goal (weekly) would be:

• Spend one hour on Sunday planning my meals for the week.
• Shop for groceries after work on Monday and Tuesday nights.
• Cook all meals at home on Wednesdays through Sundays.
• Pack my lunch for work on Mondays and Tuesdays.
• Save $100 per week in cash by cooking at home.

This process goal will help you become a better cook by teaching you to save money through planning, shopping, cooking, packing your own lunch, and trying new recipes. It also includes a weekly reward (saving $100 in cash) that will help you stay motivated.

Process goals encourage you to reach your ultimate goals. When you feel like you can accomplish smaller goals along the way, you gain sustainability and confidence to move forward.

In many ways, process goals are a lot like faith. Each accomplishment brings you closer to seeing the fullness of the life that you desire––it breaks through the fog and makes things clearer.

After several years of setting lofty goals and becoming increasingly frustrated when I wasn’t getting the results I wanted, I decided to take a closer look at my approach.

Now, there are many ways you can do this, but here’s how I went about it. Last year, I asked myself the following questions:

• What am I doing right now?
• How can I get better at this?
• Is this process goal leading me closer to my ultimate goals?

The choices I made from the answers to these questions became my process goals. They were the driving force that kept me motivated and moving forward when I wanted to give up and throw in the towel. Since then, I’ve been able to accomplish lifelong goals that I had given up on years ago. For example, I’ve been able to obtain a publishing contract, create more digital products for my business, and enjoy the moment.

Before I broke down my goals into smaller ones, I was struggling to just get out of bed. The thought of my endless list kept me stagnant. Now, I look forward to each morning and taking on smaller projects to reach profitable outcomes.

So, now that you understand the importance of process goals, let’s get you started with some examples that you can utilize this week:

• Sign up for a new class.
• Complete one portion of your project by Thursday.
• Start walking around the block instead of running a mile.
• Improve your writing by spending 30 minutes everyday journaling.
• Practice your interview skills.
• Read at least one book from the library this week.
• Do ten push-ups each day before you leave for work.

You get the idea. These process goals don’t have to be complicated. If anything, you want to break down your plans to the point of them feeling easy or at least doable without needing a week’s vacation. By breaking your goals down into smaller pieces, you can accomplish a lot more in a shorter period. You’ll also feel more confident that you’re able to accomplish something within the moment.

It isn’t easy to continue towards your goal if achievement feels too far away. You need to celebrate the small things and embrace the process.

Think about how much time and money you’ve spent on new clothes, books, technology, etc. Many of us want to keep up with the latest trends and purchase the best gadgets from Apple or Microsoft. But all of these extra investments come at a steep price.

To find your process goals, you may have to face some difficult emotions or situations bravely and confront them head-on. You might need to forgo the new outfit or the latest Mac book to meet your overall objectives. Remember, process goals not only protect you from feeling overwhelmed, but they also keep you from being distracted.

You may feel overwhelmed at first when trying to set a process goal. Sometimes, just thinking about change triggers stress hormones, which only leads to more worries and anxious feelings. However, if you keep yourself focused and take small steps in the right direction, you’ll soon realize that goals don’t have to be complicated.

You can achieve your process goals one day at a time, and you can start today by breaking down your larger goal into smaller steps. It doesn’t matter if the process takes a week or six months, what matters most is that you’re moving forward and doing something to make yourself better.

Now, go on out there and achieve one of your process goals!

Introduction

What areas of life to set goals, the different types of goals, the power of long-term goals, the importance of short-term goals, what are intermediary goals for, what you need to know about process goals, goals vs objectives, why people fail to achieve their goals, how to set goals effectively, understanding smart goal setting, why are smart goals important, smart goal template, is willpower essential for reaching goals, how to achieve your goals, how to stay focused on your goals, life goals for success, personal goals examples, weekly goals you can set, professional goals & career goals, new year's resolutions ideas, best goal journals to keep track of progress, best goal tracking apps, inspiring quotes on setting goals, quotes to help you focus on goals, all goals articles.

Featured photo credit: Kaleidico via unsplash.com

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SMART Goals in Education: Importance, Benefits, Limitations

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

Learn about our Editorial Process

The SMART Goals framework is an acronym-based framework used in education to help students set clear and structured goals related to their learning.

The framework stands for:

• Specific – The goal is clear and has a closed-ended statement of exactly what will be achieved.
• Measurable – The goal can be measured either quantitatively (e.g. earning 80% in an exam) or qualitatively (e.g. receiving positive feedback from a teacher).
• Achievable – The goal is not too hard and can reasonably be met with some effort and within the set timeframe.
• Relevant – The goal is relevant to the student’s learning and development.
• Time-Based – A clear timeframe is set to keep you on task.

(If you’re a teacher, you might prefer to read my article on goals for teachers ).

The SMART Goals Framework in Education

The framework has had multiple variations over time. However, the most common framework is in the format: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.

1. Specific

Your goal needs to be specific. This means that you need to note a clear target to aspire toward rather than something that is vague.

For students, this is important to clarify exactly what it is you’re aiming for.

Some strategies for making sure your goal is specific include:

• State what, when, where, why, and how your goals will be achieved
• State what the goal will look like when it is achieved
• Focus on the “vital few” [1] things that you want to see done to have your goal achieved

Sometimes, this may also be stated as “strategic” rather than “specific”.

See our in-depth article on examples of specific goals for students to get more ideas!

2. Measurable

Your goal needs to be measurable. This ensures that you can identify improvements from the baseline as well as know when the goal has been met.

Your objectives can be formative, summative, or a mix of both.

A formative assessment is an assessment that takes place part-way through the project. It assesses where you’re at and how much more you need to do. Formative assessments allow you to pivot and make small adjustments to your action to make sure you meet the final goal.

A summative assessment is an assessment at the end of the project to see if you met your goal. This is the final measure of success or failure.

A measurable goal may also be qualitative or quantitative.

A quantitative goal will have a grade or numerative evaluation, such as 80% on a test.

A qualitative goal will be based on a subjective evaluation, such as getting a positive report card from a mentor, or, attaining the confidence to do a public speech.

See our in-depth article on examples of measurable goals for students to get more ideas!

3. Attainable

Your goal needs to be attainable. This means that it can’t be something that’s impossible to achieve. You need to know you’ll be able to reach your goals in order to sustain motivation.

This could be compared to the goldilocks principle . Goldilocks didn’t like porridge that was too cold or too hot. It had to be just right.

In education, we use the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) to explain how to promote student development and motivation. The ZPD refers to learnable content that is not too easy and not too hard.

In this zone, students can do tasks with the support of teachers and have the motivation to work because they know the content is attainable with some effort.

4. Relevant

Often also written as ‘realistic’, a relevant goal is one that makes sense to your situation. If you are setting goals in your class, your teacher would expect that the goal was about your education and not something irrelevant to class.

Your goal should also be one that is consistent with your life plan and will help you get to where you need to be. This will help you to sustain motivation and ensure the goal makes sense in the long term.

While having personal goals unrelated to your coursework is great, it’s not relevant to the lesson that you’re doing within the class on the day, so remember to set your goal so it’s related to your learning.

5. Time-Based

Setting a time by which you want to meet your goals helps to keep you on track and accountable to yourself. Without time-based end goals, you may delay your goals and lose momentum.

You can also set intermittent milestones to help keep yourself on track. This can ensure you don’t let other shorter-term and more pressing tasks get in the way and get you off track.

SMARTER Goals Add-On

Some scholars have provided additional steps to the framework. One common one is to add ‘ER’ [2] :

6. Exciting

You are more likely to achieve a goal if you make it exciting. This will motivate you to carry out your plan.

An example of excitement added to a goal would be to create some self-rewards if it is completed, like “If I complete the goal I will take myself out for dinner.”

The ‘E’ is also often added when the goals are for teachers or leaders who are setting goals for their students or staff. By making the goal exciting, they’ll be able to get buy-in from students and staff.

7. Recorded

The ‘R’ often stands for ‘Recorded’ and asks you to show how you are going to record progress.

This one is somewhat similar to ‘Measurable’ but expands on it by asking not only how you’re going to measure success, but how are you going to record progress. Keeping a journal, for example, can help you record progress and reflect on the process of chasing your coals.

The Importance of SMART Goals in Education

Goal setting helps students and teachers to develop a vision for self-improvement . Without clear goals, there is no clear and agreed-upon direction for learning.

For this reason, goals have been used extensively in education. Examples include:

• Curriculum outcomes
• Developmental milestones
• Standardized testing
• Summative and formative assessments

The SMART framework, however, tends to be a student-led way of setting goals. It enables students to reflect on what they want to achieve and plan how to achieve these goals.

As a result, the framework doesn’t just help students articulate what they want out of their education. It also provides a range of soft skills for students such as:

• Motivation for growth
• Reflective practice
• Self Evaluation
• Structured analytical thinking

Read Also: Examples of SMART Goals for Students

SMART Goals Advantages and Disadvantages

Benefits of smart goals.

The SMART framework is widely used because it helps students to clarify their goals and how they are going to go about achieving them. Often, students start with a vague statement of intention, but by the end of the session, they have fleshed out their goals using the SMART template.

Some benefits of the template include:

Limitations of SMART Goals

While the framework is easy to use and implement, it does face a few limitations. One major downside is that it doesn’t account for the importance of incrementalism in self-improvement. Students need to break down their goals into a series of milestones.

Some limitations of the template include:

SMART Goals Template

Get the Google Docs Template Here

SMART goals help students to reflect on what they want from their education and how to achieve it. They provide a template and framework for students to go into more depth about their goals so they are not simply vague statements, but rather actionable statements of intent.

A lesson where you get your students to set out their goals will often have students leaving the class with a much deeper understanding of what they want out of their education and how they might go about getting it.

Read Also: A List of Long-Term Goals for Students and A List of Short-Term Goals for Students

[1] O’Neil, J. and Conzemius, A. (2006). The Power of SMART Goals: Using Goals to Improve Student Learning . London: Solution Tree Press.

[2]  Yemm, G. (2013). Essential Guide to Leading Your Team: How to Set Goals, Measure Performance and Reward Talent . Melbourne: Pearson Education. pp. 37–39.

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 101 Class Group Name Ideas (for School Students)
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 19 Top Cognitive Psychology Theories (Explained)
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 119 Bloom’s Taxonomy Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ All 6 Levels of Understanding (on Bloom’s Taxonomy)

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The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning

Establishing learning goals.

• Teaching Resources
• Course Design

Learning goals are the intended purposes and desired achievements of a particular course, which generally identify the knowledge, skills, and capacities a student in that class should achieve.

Why set learning goals?

• In a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses about teaching and learning, educational researcher John Hattie (2011, p. 130) concludes that "having clear intentions and success criteria (goals)" is one of the key strategies that "works best" in improving student achievement in higher education.
• Being transparent about how and why students are learning in particular ways has been found to increase students' confidence, sense of belonging, and retention -- with key benefits for first-generation, low-income and underrepresented students ( Winkelmes, Bernacki, Butler, Zochowski, Golanics and Weavil, 2016 ).

What are examples of learning goals?

Three widely-used frameworks for learning goals include Bloom's Taxonomy, Fink's Taxonomy of Learning Experiences, and the Lumina Foundation's Degree Qualifications Profile.

• Bloom's Taxonomy sequences thinking skills from lower-order (e.g., remembering) to higher-order (e.g., evaluating, creating). (Bloom's Taxonomy was developed in 1956 and Anderson and Krathwohl created a revised taxonomy in 2001). This visual from Iowa State University's Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching offers an  example of learning goals keyed to Bloom levels .
• Dee Fink (2003) argues that faculty can create significant learning experiences when they address their students’ intellectual development holistically. Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning distinguishes six kinds of learning: 1) foundational knowledge, 2) application, 3) integration, 4) human dimensions (i.e. knowledge of self and others), 5) caring (i.e. appreciating or valuing the subject matter), and 6) learning how to learn. Section 5 of the US Air Force Academy’s “A Primer on Writing Effective Learner-Centered Course Goals” describes the taxonomy in more detail and provides verb stems and sample goals keyed to these six types of learning.
• The Lumina Foundations's  Degree Qualifications Profile  identifies specific learning outcomes for bachelor's and master's students in five categories: specialized knowledge, broad and integrative knowledge, intellectual skills, applied and collaborative learning, and civic and global learning. The process of "tuning" means adopting these broad outcomes to specific disciplines.

What are examples of learning goals at Brown?

• Brown's directory of Undergraduate Programs  lists department undergraduate learning goals.
• Learning outcomes for  anthropology ,  chemistry ,  economics ,  education  and  geology  were established in the 2011-13 Sheridan Teagle Grant.

What self-directed resources can identify goals for my students' learning?

• Articulate Your Learning Objectives  offers key steps (Carnegie Mellon University's Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation).
• Angelo and Cross's (1993)  Teaching Goals Inventory  offers a 53-item self-assessment to make explicit your implicit goals for student learning.

Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R., et al. (Eds.) (2001).  A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives . Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993).  Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bloom, B. S. (1956).  Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook 1: Cognitive domain . New York: David McKay Co. Inc.

Fink, D. L. (2003).  Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hattie, J. (2011). Which strategies best enhance teaching and learning in higher education? In D. Mashek and E. Y. Hammer, Eds.  Empirical research in teaching and learning: Contributions from social psychology  (pp. 130-142). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Winkelmes, M., Bernacki, M., Butler, J., Zochowski, M., Golanics, J., & Weavil, K.H. (2016). Teaching intervention that increases underserved college students' success.  AAC&U Peer Review , 16(1/2).  https://www.aacu.org/peerreview/2016/winter-spring/Winkelmes .

• Our Mission

What Is Education For?

Read an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson, which calls for redesigning education for the future.

What is education for? As it happens, people differ sharply on this question. It is what is known as an “essentially contested concept.” Like “democracy” and “justice,” “education” means different things to different people. Various factors can contribute to a person’s understanding of the purpose of education, including their background and circumstances. It is also inflected by how they view related issues such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. Still, not having an agreed-upon definition of education doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it or do anything about it.

We just need to be clear on terms. There are a few terms that are often confused or used interchangeably—“learning,” “education,” “training,” and “school”—but there are important differences between them. Learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. Education is an organized system of learning. Training is a type of education that is focused on learning specific skills. A school is a community of learners: a group that comes together to learn with and from each other. It is vital that we differentiate these terms: children love to learn, they do it naturally; many have a hard time with education, and some have big problems with school.

There are many assumptions of compulsory education. One is that young people need to know, understand, and be able to do certain things that they most likely would not if they were left to their own devices. What these things are and how best to ensure students learn them are complicated and often controversial issues. Another assumption is that compulsory education is a preparation for what will come afterward, like getting a good job or going on to higher education.

So, what does it mean to be educated now? Well, I believe that education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

This core purpose of education can be broken down into four basic purposes.

Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided. There is a deep correlation between our experience of the world around us and how we feel. As we explored in the previous chapters, all individuals have unique strengths and weaknesses, outlooks and personalities. Students do not come in standard physical shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. They all have their own aptitudes and dispositions and different ways of understanding things. Education is therefore deeply personal. It is about cultivating the minds and hearts of living people. Engaging them as individuals is at the heart of raising achievement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Many of the deepest problems in current systems of education result from losing sight of this basic principle.

Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others. There are various definitions of culture, but in this context the most appropriate is “the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups.” To put it more bluntly, it is “the way we do things around here.” Education is one of the ways that communities pass on their values from one generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences. For others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance. As the world becomes more crowded and connected, it is becoming more complex culturally. Living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative.

There should be three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures.

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent. This is one of the reasons governments take such a keen interest in education: they know that an educated workforce is essential to creating economic prosperity. Leaders of the Industrial Revolution knew that education was critical to creating the types of workforce they required, too. But the world of work has changed so profoundly since then, and continues to do so at an ever-quickening pace. We know that many of the jobs of previous decades are disappearing and being rapidly replaced by contemporary counterparts. It is almost impossible to predict the direction of advancing technologies, and where they will take us.

How can schools prepare students to navigate this ever-changing economic landscape? They must connect students with their unique talents and interests, dissolve the division between academic and vocational programs, and foster practical partnerships between schools and the world of work, so that young people can experience working environments as part of their education, not simply when it is time for them to enter the labor market.

Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens. We live in densely woven social systems. The benefits we derive from them depend on our working together to sustain them. The empowerment of individuals has to be balanced by practicing the values and responsibilities of collective life, and of democracy in particular. Our freedoms in democratic societies are not automatic. They come from centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy and those who foment sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Those struggles are far from over. As John Dewey observed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

For a democratic society to function, it depends upon the majority of its people to be active within the democratic process. In many democracies, this is increasingly not the case. Schools should engage students in becoming active, and proactive, democratic participants. An academic civics course will scratch the surface, but to nurture a deeply rooted respect for democracy, it is essential to give young people real-life democratic experiences long before they come of age to vote.

Eight Core Competencies

The conventional curriculum is based on a collection of separate subjects. These are prioritized according to beliefs around the limited understanding of intelligence we discussed in the previous chapter, as well as what is deemed to be important later in life. The idea of “subjects” suggests that each subject, whether mathematics, science, art, or language, stands completely separate from all the other subjects. This is problematic. Mathematics, for example, is not defined only by propositional knowledge; it is a combination of types of knowledge, including concepts, processes, and methods as well as propositional knowledge. This is also true of science, art, and languages, and of all other subjects. It is therefore much more useful to focus on the concept of disciplines rather than subjects.

Disciplines are fluid; they constantly merge and collaborate. In focusing on disciplines rather than subjects we can also explore the concept of interdisciplinary learning. This is a much more holistic approach that mirrors real life more closely—it is rare that activities outside of school are as clearly segregated as conventional curriculums suggest. A journalist writing an article, for example, must be able to call upon skills of conversation, deductive reasoning, literacy, and social sciences. A surgeon must understand the academic concept of the patient’s condition, as well as the practical application of the appropriate procedure. At least, we would certainly hope this is the case should we find ourselves being wheeled into surgery.

The concept of disciplines brings us to a better starting point when planning the curriculum, which is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. The four purposes above suggest eight core competencies that, if properly integrated into education, will equip students who leave school to engage in the economic, cultural, social, and personal challenges they will inevitably face in their lives. These competencies are curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. Rather than be triggered by age, they should be interwoven from the beginning of a student’s educational journey and nurtured throughout.

From Imagine If: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D and Kate Robinson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Sir Kenneth Robinson and Kate Robinson.

Additional Chapters

The learning process.

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. —Audre Lorde, writer and civil rights activist

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify the stages of the learning process
• Define learning styles, and identify your preferred learning style(s)
• Define multimodal learning
• Describe how you might apply your preferred learning strategies to classroom scenarios

Stages of the Learning Process

Consider experiences you’ve had with learning something new, such as learning to tie your shoes or drive a car. You probably began by showing interest in the process, and after some struggling it became second nature. These experiences were all part of the learning process, which can be described in the four stages:

• Unconscious incompetence : This will likely be the easiest learning stage—you don’t know what you don’t know yet. During this stage, a learner mainly shows interest in something or prepares for learning. For example, if you wanted to learn how to dance, you might watch a video, talk to an instructor, or sign up for a future class. Stage 1 might not take long.
• Conscious incompetence : This stage can be the most difficult for learners, because you begin to register how much you need to learn—you know what you don’t know. Think about the saying “It’s easier said than done.” In stage 1 the learner only has to discuss or show interest in a new experience, but in stage 2, he or she begins to apply new skills that contribute to reaching the learning goal. In the dance example above, you would now be learning basic dance steps. Successful completion of this stage relies on practice.
• Conscious competence : You are beginning to master some parts of the learning goal and are feeling some confidence about what you do know. For example, you might now be able to complete basic dance steps with few mistakes and without your instructor reminding you how to do them. Stage 3 requires skill repetition.
• Unconscious competence : This is the final stage in which learners have successfully practiced and repeated the process they learned so many times that they can do it almost without thinking. At this point in your dancing, you might be able to apply your dance skills to a freestyle dance routine that you create yourself. However, to feel you are a “master” of a particular skill by the time you reach stage 4, you still need to practice constantly and reevaluate which stage you are in so you can keep learning. For example, if you now felt confident in basic dance skills and could perform your own dance routine, perhaps you’d want to explore other kinds of dance, such as tango or swing. That would return you to stage 1 or 2, but you might progress through the stages more quickly this time on account of the dance skills you acquired earlier. [1]

Kyle was excited to take a beginning Spanish class to prepare for a semester abroad in Spain. Before his first vocabulary quiz, he reviewed his notes many times. Kyle took the quiz, but when he got the results, he was surprised to see that he had earned a B-, despite having studied so much. 

Identifying Learning Styles

Many of us, like Kyle, are accustomed to very traditional learning styles as a result of our experience as K–12 students. For instance, we can all remember listening to a teacher talk, and copying notes off the chalkboard. However, when it comes to learning, one size doesn’t fit all. People have different learning styles and preferences, and these can vary from subject to subject. For example, while Kyle might prefer listening to recordings to help him learn Spanish, he might prefer hands-on activities like labs to master the concepts in his biology course. But what are learning styles, and where does the idea come from?

Learning styles are also called  learning modalities . Walter Burke Barbe and his colleagues proposed the following three learning modalities (often identified by the acronym VAK):

• Kinesthetic

Examples of these modalities are shown in the table, below.

Neil Fleming’s VARK model expanded on the three modalities described above and added “Read/Write Learning” as a fourth.

The four sensory modalities in Fleming’s model are:

• Visual learning
• Auditory learning
• Read/write learning
• Kinesthetic learning

Fleming claimed that visual learners have a preference for seeing (visual aids that represent ideas using methods other than words, such as graphs, charts, diagrams, symbols, etc.). Auditory learners best learn through listening (lectures, discussions, tapes, etc.). Read/write learners have a preference for written words (readings, dictionaries, reference works, research, etc.) Tactile/kinesthetic learners prefer to learn via experience—moving, touching, and doing (active exploration of the world, science projects, experiments, etc.).

The VAK/VARK models can be a helpful way of thinking about different learning styles and preferences, but they are certainly not the last word on how people learn or prefer to learn. Many educators consider the distinctions useful, finding that students benefit from having access to a blend of learning approaches. Others find the idea of three or four “styles” to be distracting or limiting.

In the college setting, you’ll probably discover that instructors teach their course materials according to the method they think will be most effective for all students. Thus, regardless of your individual learning preference, you will probably be asked to engage in all types of learning. For instance, even though you consider yourself to be a “visual learner,” you will still probably have to write papers in some of your classes. Research suggests that it’s good for the brain to learn in new ways and that learning in different modalities can help learners become more well-rounded. Consider the following statistics on how much content students absorb through different learning methods:

• 10 percent of content they read
• 20 percent of content they hear
• 30 percent of content they visualize
• 50 percent of what they both visualize and hear
• 70 percent of what they say
• 90 percent of what they say and do

The range of these results underscores the importance of mixing up the ways in which you study and engage with learning materials.

Activity: Identifying Preferred Learning Styles

• Define learning styles, and recognize your preferred learning style(s)
• Now it’s time to consider your preferred learning style(s). Take the VARK Questionnaire here .
• Review the types of learning preferences.
• Identify three different classes and describe what types of activities you typically do in these classes. Which learning style(s) do these activities relate to?
• Describe what you think your preferred learning style(s) is/are. How do you know?
• Explain how you could apply your preferred learning style(s) to studying.
• What might your preferred learning style(s) tell you about your interests? Consider which subjects and eventual careers you might like.
• Follow your instructor’s guidelines for submitting your assignment.

Defining Multimodal Learning

While completing the learning-styles activity, you might have discovered that you prefer more than one learning style. Applying more than one learning style is known as multimodal learning. This strategy is useful not only for students who prefer to combine learning styles but also for those who may not know which learning style works best for them. It’s also a good way to mix things up and keep learning fun.

For example, consider how you might combine visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles to a biology class. For visual learning, you could create flash cards containing images of individual animals and the species name. For auditory learning, you could have a friend quiz you on the flash cards. For kinesthetic learning, you could move the flash cards around on a board to show a food web (food chain).

The following video will help you review the types of learning styles and see how they might relate to your study habits:

The next assignment can help you extend and apply what you’ve learned about multimodal learning to current classes and studying.

Activity: Applying Learning Styles to Class

• Apply your preferred learning styles to classroom scenarios
• Review the three main learning styles and the definition of multimodal learning.
• Identify a class you are currently taking that requires studying.
• Describe how you could study for this class using visual, auditory, and kinesthetic/tactile learning skills.
• Follow your instructor’s guidelines for submitting your activity.
• Mansaray, David. "The Four Stages of Learning: The Path to Becoming an Expert." DavidMansaray.com . 2011. Web. 10 Feb 2016. ↵
• The Learning Process. Authored by : Jolene Carr. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Learning Styles. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• SU13_KentLeach_MT_Edit (29 of 65). Provided by : UC Davis College of Engineering. Located at : https://www.flickr.com/photos/ucdaviscoe/9731984405/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
• The Process of Learning - Kristos. Authored by : calikristos. Located at : https://youtu.be/G1eQ6JWAi9Q . License : All Rights Reserved . License Terms : Standard YouTube License
• Discover Your Learning Style and Optimize Your Self Study. Authored by : Langfocus. Located at : https://youtu.be/dvMex7KXLvM . License : All Rights Reserved . License Terms : Standard YouTube License

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Center for Engaged Learning

Process-driven model of education.

by Ketevan Kupatadze

October 10, 2017

In this blog I will continue reflecting on the various ways in which the student-faculty partnership model could challenge or simply take a different approach towards the established higher education system. Here I focus on Students-as-Partner’s emphasis on the open and unpredictable process of teaching and learning rather than the predetermined teaching and learning goals and outcomes. There seems to exist a slight disconnect between the policies at the institutional as well as supra-institutional levels that aim to assure the quality and standards of education through continuous assessment and the pedagogical philosophy rooted in the principles of partnership between students and educators. Two possible solutions to such disconnect seem to be a) the acceptance of education as at times an unpredictable and changeable process, and b) the development of tools and resources that would help us assess or evaluate the learning that happens through partnership.

In “A Model of Active Student Participation in Curriculum Design: Exploring Desirability and Possibility,” Bovill and Bulley (2011) state that “our systems of quality assurance require courses to be validated and reviewed on the basis of clear intended learning outcomes and assessments” (p. 6). In the same vein, Healey, Flint and Harrington (2014) recognize the important role of the institutions and professional organizations that set the guidelines and standards for educational goals and outcomes. Without a doubt, our focus on teaching and learning goals and outcomes and their assessment has a long-standing tradition and will be incredibly hard and, more importantly, counterproductive to discard. But at the same time, the advocates of student-faculty partnership in teaching and leaning view this practice as a process rather than as a goal and outcomes-driven activity and, as such, one that has the potential to dramatically transform the purpose and structure of higher education that is largely based on delivering results in the form of outcomes through assessment (Healey et al., 2014).  Healey et al. maintain that unlike the current model that is end-oriented, the student-faculty partnership is pedagogy that is “(radically) open to and creating possibilities for discovering and learning something that cannot be known beforehand”(2014, p. 9).

This opinion is also shared by Matthews (2016) who acknowledges that SaP model is inherently process-oriented rather than outcomes-driven (p. 3). She maintains that the language of student engagement has been and remains outcomes focused, while Students as Partners is process and values oriented (p. 3). The question then is: how does one engage in student-faculty partnership, opening up to the possibility of not knowing the end-point of teaching and learning whether in a specific course, set of courses or an entire curriculum and, simultaneously, continue assessing student learning to ensure that the standards set by their institution or professional organization(s) are met?

To answer these questions, several studies have pointed out that we might, and even should, be having a conversation on the ways to incorporate assessment in the student-faculty partnership process (Cook-Sather et al. 2014; Healey et al. 2014;). Healey et al suggest that to address this issue we might “look for opportunities for employing partnership as a way of responding to other influential discourses; use the concept and practice of partnership to meet the requirements” set out by our institutions and/or professional organizations; and “consider how reward and recognition for partnership may be developed” (p. 58). Cook-Sather et al., on their part, suggest that assessment should be also co-envisioned and co-developed by faculty and students as partners, since it is an integral part of teaching and learning process (p. 188). The authors offer various examples: involvement of students in the design of course learning goals and outcomes, such as inviting students to develop course goals either in the beginning or the end of the term; inviting them to reflect on their end of course feedback; involving them in the process itself of developing assignment, course, or curriculum assessment such as end-of-term course evaluation questionnaires and course assessment tools while the course is in progress; offering students an opportunity to reflect on their learning throughout the course; working with students outside the class setting to assess learning across courses, etc.

This conversation about the ways to partner with students on assessment as a valued part of the teaching and learning process is new and ongoing. It is one of the areas that needs most attention as we move towards a more egalitarian educational model in which we – faculty and students – see each other as partners and collaborators. I would be curious to know of different ways one could partner with students to teach, while simultaneously making sure that the educational standards are met through continuous process of assessing instructors’ and students’ teaching and learning goals.

Bibliography

• Bovill, C., and Bulley, C.J. (2011) A model of active student participation in curriculum design: exploring desirability and possibility. In Rust, C. (ed.)  Improving Student Learning (ISL) 18: Global Theories and Local Practices: Institutional, Disciplinary and Cultural Variations.  Series: Improving Student Learning (18). Oxford Brookes University: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development: Oxford, pp. 176-188. ISBN 9781873576809
• Cook-Sather, A., Bovill, C., and Felten, P. (2014).  Engaging students as partners in learning and teaching: a guide for faculty.  San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass.
• Healey, M., Flint, A., & Harrington, K. (2014). Engagement through partnership: Students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. York: Higher Education Academy. Retrieved from https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/engagement-through-partnership-students-partners-learning-and-teaching-higher-education
• Matthews, K. E. (2016). Students as partners as the future of student engagement. Student Engagement in Higher Education Journal, 1 (1) 1-5. Retrieved from https://journals.gre.ac.uk/index.php/raise/article/view/380/338

Ketevan Kupatadze, Senior Lecturer in Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures, is the  2017-2019 Center for Engaged Learning Scholar . Dr. Kupatadze’s CEL Scholar project focuses on student-faculty partnerships.

How to cite this post:

Kupatadze, Ketevan. 2017, October 10. Process-Driven Model of Education. [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/process-driven-model-of-education/

• Engaged Learning
• Student-Faculty Partnership
• Ketevan Kupatadze

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Goal Setting: Outcome, Performance and Process Goals

In this article:

The process of goal setting based on outcome, performance and process goals comes from the world of athletics, but is equally applicable to business and personal development. Whether you are an athlete or the CEO of a business, this article will give you the tools you need to start planning like an athlete.

Why Should We Set Goals?

Having short and long term goals can have a number of benefits, including:

There are three types of goals: outcome, performance and process goals. Goal setting is broken down in this way as it makes it easier to organise our thinking around how we’re going to achieve our goals.

Outcome Goals

An outcome goal is the singular goal that you are working towards. Outcome goals are very often binary and involve winning, for example, wanting to win a gold medal or wanting to be the largest company in your sector. Whilst outcome goals are hugely motivating, they are not under your control as they are affected by how others perform. In a sporting sense this might mean that someone outperforms you on the field of play, and in a business sense this could happen if one of your key team members was ill or your competition outsmarted you.

Performance Goals

A performance goal is a performance standard that you are trying to achieve. These are the performance standards you set for yourself to achieve if you are going to build towards your outcome goal.

Their 2nd performance goal might be to:

Process Goals

Process goals support performance goals by giving you something to focus on as you work towards your performance goals. Process goals are completely under your control. They are the small things you should focus on or do to eventually achieve your performance goals.

Examples of process goals include:

Using SMARTER Goals

Both athletes and business people frequently set goals that are very difficult to measure, for example, “win a gold medal” or “win on mobile”. To avoid this trap make sure that all of your goals are SMARTER:

An Example from Sports

Let’s look at a complete example to really make this sink in. Let’s say you did want to finish top 10 in a local 5k running race, then your goals might look like this:

An Example from Business

Let’s look at a complete example from business to further build our understanding. Suppose our revenue is currently at $500k per month and we wanted to generate $1m revenue per month, then our goals might look like this.

Sometimes we set goals such as to win a gold medal, or to generate more revenue than our competitors this month, however, the reality is that we don’t actually have control over these goals, our competitors could compete better and win.

Using Outcome, Performance and Process Goals in Real Life

In addition to setting SMART goals as described above when setting outcome, performance and process goals, it can be a good idea to break down the timeline of achieving your outcomes into smaller blocks of time. A 2007 study by psychologist Richard Wiseman showed that 88% of people who make New Year’s resolutions fail. For this reason don’t make detailed long range plans focusing a year out or more. Instead stick to a shorter timescale like 13 weeks. There are a number of reasons to do this:

Goal Setting Template

Cite this article, related tools, the stages of change model, panas scale (positive and negative affect schedule), honey and mumford learning styles, perma model of well-being, cognitive restructuring, book summary: the lean startup by eric ries, benefits of goal setting, the dunning-kruger effect, book summary: atomic habits by james clear, in our course you will learn how to:.

This 5-week course will teach you everything you need to know to set up and then scale a small, part-time business that will be profitable regardless of what’s happening in the economy.

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Goal-Setting

What is goal setting?

There are three types of goals- process, performance, and outcome goals.

• Process goals are specific actions or ‘processes’ of performing. For example, aiming to study for 2 hours after dinner every day . Process goals are 100% controllable by the individual.
• Performance goals are based on personal standard. For example, aiming to achieve a 3.5 GPA. Personal goals are mostly controllable.
• Outcome goals are based on winning. For a college student, this could look like landing a job in your field or landing job at a particular place of employment you wanted. Outcome goals are very difficult to control because of other outside influences.

Process, performance, and outcome goals have a linear relationship. This is important because if you achieve your process goals, you give yourself a good chance to achieve your performance goals. Similarly, when you achieve your performance goals, you have a better chance of achieving your outcome goal.

General Goal Setting Tips

• set both short- and long-term goals
• set SMART goals
• set goals that motivate you
• write your goals down and put them in a place you can see
• adjust your goals as necessary
• Recognize and reward yourself when you meet a goal

Set SMART Goals

Set all three types of goals- process, performance, and outcome – but focus on executing your smaller process goals to give you the best chance for success!

• specific – highly detailed statement on what you want to accomplish (use who, what, where, how etc.)
• Measurable- how will you demonstrate and evaluate how your goal has been met?
• Attainable- they can be achieved by your own hard work and dedication- make sure your goals are within your ability to achieve
• Relevant- how does your goals align with your objectives?
• Time based- set 1 or more target dates- these are the “by whens” to guide your goal to successful and timely completion (include deadlines, frequency and dates)

Goal Setting Handout – Center for Performance Psychology

Applied Exercises

Goal Setting Worksheet

Goal Setting Worksheet – Center for Performance Psychology

Articles on Goal Setting

• Importance of Goal Setting
• Before Setting New Goals, Evaluate Previous Ones

Goal Setting Videos

This video discusses goal setting  by the Academic Success Center at Oregon State University.

This video teaches you how to set short term weekly goals.

This video demonstrates goal setting one step at a time.

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3 The learning process

When my son Michael was old enough to talk, and being an eager but naïve dad, I decided to bring Michael to my educational psychology class to demonstrate to my students “how children learn”. In one task I poured water from a tall drinking glass to a wide glass pie plate, which according to Michael changed the “amount” of water—there was less now than it was in the pie plate. I told him that, on the contrary, the amount of water had stayed the same whether it was in the glass or the pie plate. He looked at me a bit strangely, but complied with my point of view—agreeing at first that, yes, the amount had stayed the same. But by the end of the class session he had reverted to his original position: there was less water, he said, when it was poured into the pie plate compared to being poured into the drinking glass. So much for demonstrating “learning”!

(Kelvin Seifert)

Learning is generally defined as relatively permanent changes in behavior, skills, knowledge, or attitudes resulting from identifiable psychological or social experiences. A key feature is permanence: changes do not count as learning if they are temporary. You do not “learn” a phone number if you forget it the minute after you dial the number; you do not “learn” to eat vegetables if you only do it when forced. The change has to last. Notice, though, that learning can be physical, social, or emotional as well as cognitive. You do not “learn” to sneeze simply by catching cold, but you do learn many skills and behaviors that are physically based, such as riding a bicycle or throwing a ball. You can also learn to like (or dislike) a person, even though this change may not happen deliberately.

Each year after that first visit to my students, while Michael was still a preschooler, I returned with him to my ed-psych class to do the same “learning demonstrations”. And each year Michael came along happily, but would again fail the task about the drinking glass and the pie plate. He would comply briefly if I “suggested” that the amount of water stayed the same no matter which way it was poured, but in the end he would still assert that the amount had changed. He was not learning this bit of conventional knowledge, in spite of my repeated efforts.

But the year he turned six, things changed. When I told him it was time to visit my ed-psych class again, he readily agreed and asked: “Are you going to ask me about the water in the drinking glass and pie plate again?” I said yes, I was indeed planning to do that task again. “That’s good”, he responded, “because I know that the amount stays the same even after you pour it. But do you want me to fake it this time? For your students’ sake?”

Teachers’ perspectives on learning

For teachers, learning usually refers to things that happen in schools or classrooms, even though every teacher can of course describe examples of learning that happen outside of these places. Even Michael, at age 6, had begun realizing that what counted as “learning” in his dad’s educator-type mind was something that happened in a classroom, under the supervision of a teacher (me). For me, as for many educators, the term has a more specific meaning than for many people less involved in schools. In particular, teachers’ perspectives on learning often emphasize three ideas, and sometimes even take them for granted: (1) curriculum content and academic achievement, (2) sequencing and readiness, and (3) the importance of transferring learning to new or future situations.

Viewing learning as dependent on curriculum

When teachers speak of learning, they tend to emphasize whatever is taught in schools deliberately, including both the official curriculum and the various behaviors and routines that make classrooms run smoothly. In practice, defining learning in this way often means that teachers equate learning with the major forms of academic achievement—especially language and mathematics—and to a lesser extent musical skill, physical coordination, or social sensitivity (Gardner, 1999, 2006). The imbalance occurs not because the goals of public education make teachers responsible for certain content and activities (like books and reading) and the skills which these activities require (like answering teachers’ questions and writing essays). It does happen not (thankfully!) because teachers are biased, insensitive, or unaware that students often learn a lot outside of school.

A side effect of thinking of learning as related only to curriculum or academics is that classroom social interactions and behaviors become issues for teachers—become things that they need to manage. In particular, having dozens of students in one room makes it more likely that I, as a teacher, think of “learning” as something that either takes concentration (to avoid being distracted by others) or that benefits from collaboration (to take advantage of their presence). In the small space of a classroom, no other viewpoint about social interaction makes sense. Yet in the wider world outside of school, learning often does happen incidentally, “accidentally” and without conscious interference or input from others: I “learn” what a friend’s personality is like, for example, without either of us deliberately trying to make this happen. As teachers, we sometimes see incidental learning in classrooms as well, and often welcome it; but our responsibility for curriculum goals more often focuses our efforts on what students can learn through conscious, deliberate effort. In a classroom, unlike in many other human settings, it is always necessary to ask whether classmates are helping or hindering individual students’ learning.

Focusing learning on changes in classrooms has several other effects. One, for example, is that it can tempt teachers to think that what is taught is equivalent to what is learned—even though most teachers know that doing so is a mistake, and that teaching and learning can be quite different. If I assign a reading to my students about the Russian Revolution, it would be nice to assume not only that they have read the same words, but also learned the same content. But that assumption is not usually the reality. Some students may have read and learned all of what I assigned; others may have read everything but misunderstood the material or remembered only some of it; and still others, unfortunately, may have neither read nor learned much of anything. Chances are that my students would confirm this picture, if asked confidentially. There are ways, of course, to deal helpfully with such diversity of outcomes; for suggestions, see especially Chapter 11 “Planning instruction” and Chapter 12 “Teacher-made assessment strategies”. But whatever instructional strategies I adopt, they cannot include assuming that what I teach is the same as what students understand or retain of what I teach.

Viewing learning as dependent on sequencing and readiness

The distinction between teaching and learning creates a secondary issue for teachers, that of educational readiness . Traditionally the concept referred to students’ preparedness to cope with or profit from the activities and expectations of school. A kindergarten child was “ready” to start school, for example, if he or she was in good health, showed moderately good social skills, could take care of personal physical needs (like eating lunch or going to the bathroom unsupervised), could use a pencil to make simple drawings, and so on. Table 2   shows a similar set of criteria for determining whether a child is “ready” to learn to read (Copple & Bredekamp, 2006). At older ages (such as in high school or university), the term readiness is often replaced by a more specific term, prerequisites. To take a course in physics, for example, a student must first have certain prerequisite experiences, such as studying advanced algebra or calculus. To begin work as a public school teacher, a person must first engage in practice teaching for a period of time (not to mention also studying educational psychology!).

Table 2: Reading readiness in students vs in teachers

Note that this traditional meaning, of readiness as preparedness, focuses attention on students’ adjustment to school and away from the reverse: the possibility that schools and teachers also have a responsibility for adjusting to students. But the latter idea is in fact a legitimate, second meaning for readiness: If 5-year-old children normally need to play a lot and keep active, then it is fair to say that their kindergarten teacher needs to be “ready” for this behavior by planning for a program that allows a lot of play and physical activity. If she cannot or will not do so (whatever the reason may be), then in a very real sense this failure is not the children’s responsibility. Among older students, the second, teacher-oriented meaning of readiness makes sense as well. If a teacher has a student with a disability (for example, the student is visually impaired), then the teacher has to adjust her approach in appropriate ways—not simply expect a visually impaired child to “sink or swim”. As you might expect, this sense of readiness is very important for special education, so I discuss it further in Chapter 6 “Students with special educational needs”. But the issue of readiness also figures importantly whenever students are diverse (which is most of the time), so it also comes up in Chapter 5 “Student diversity”.

Viewing transfer as a crucial outcome of learning

Still another result of focusing the concept of learning on classrooms is that it raises issues of usefulness or transfer, which is the ability to use knowledge or skill in situations beyond the ones in which they are acquired. Learning to read and learning to solve arithmetic problems, for example, are major goals of the elementary school curriculum because those skills are meant to be used not only inside the classroom, but outside as well. We teachers intend, that is, for reading and arithmetic skills to “transfer”, even though we also do our best to make the skills enjoyable while they are still being learned. In the world inhabited by teachers, even more than in other worlds, making learning fun is certainly a good thing to do, but making learning useful as well as fun is even better. Combining enjoyment and usefulness, in fact, is a “gold standard” of teaching: we generally seek it for students, even though we may not succeed at providing it all of the time.

Major theories and models of learning

Several ideas and priorities, then, affect how we teachers think about learning, including the curriculum, the difference between teaching and learning, sequencing, readiness, and transfer. The ideas form a “screen” through which to understand and evaluate whatever psychology has to offer education. As it turns out, many theories, concepts, and ideas from educational psychology do make it through the “screen” of education, meaning that they are consistent with the professional priorities of teachers and helpful in solving important problems of classroom teaching. In the case of issues about classroom learning, for example, educational psychologists have developed a number of theories and concepts that are relevant to classrooms, in that they describe at least some of what usually happens there and offer guidance for assisting learning. It is helpful to group the theories according to whether they focus on changes in behavior or in thinking. The distinction is rough and inexact, but a good place to begin. For starters, therefore, consider two perspectives about learning, called behaviorism (learning as changes in overt behavior) and constructivism, (learning as changes in thinking). The second category can be further divided into psychological constructivism (changes in thinking resulting from individual experiences), and social constructivism, (changes in thinking due to assistance from others). The rest of this chapter describes key ideas from each of these viewpoints. As I hope you will see, each describes some aspects of learning not just in general, but as it happens in classrooms in particular. So each perspective suggests things that you might do in your classroom to make students’ learning more productive.

Behaviorism: changes in what students do

Behaviorism is a perspective on learning that focuses on changes in individuals’ observable behaviors— changes in what people say or do. At some point we all use this perspective, whether we call it “behaviorism” or something else. The first time that I drove a car, for example, I was concerned primarily with whether I could actually do the driving, not with whether I could describe or explain how to drive. For another example: when I reached the point in life where I began cooking meals for myself, I was more focused on whether I could actually produce edible food in a kitchen than with whether I could explain my recipes and cooking procedures to others. And still another example—one often relevant to new teachers: when I began my first year of teaching, I was more focused on doing the job of teaching—on day-to-day survival—than on pausing to reflect on what I was doing.

Note that in all of these examples, focusing attention on behavior instead of on “thoughts” may have been desirable at that moment, but not necessarily desirable indefinitely or all of the time. Even as a beginner, there are times when it is more important to be able to describe how to drive or to cook than to actually do these things. And there definitely are many times when reflecting on and thinking about teaching can improve teaching itself. (As a teacher-friend once said to me: “Don’t just do something; stand there!”) But neither is focusing on behavior which is not necessarily less desirable than focusing on students’ “inner” changes, such as gains in their knowledge or their personal attitudes. If you are teaching, you will need to attend to all forms of learning in students, whether inner or outward.

In classrooms, behaviorism is most useful for identifying relationships between specific actions by a student and the immediate precursors and consequences of the actions. It is less useful for understanding changes in students’ thinking; for this purpose we need a more cognitive (or thinking-oriented) theory, like the ones described later in this chapter. This fact is not really a criticism of behaviorism as a perspective, but just a clarification of its particular strength or source of usefulness, which is to highlight observable relationships among actions, precursors and consequences. Behaviorists use particular terms (or “lingo”, some might say) for these relationships. They also rely primarily on two basic images or models of behavioral learning, called respondent (or “classical”) conditioning and operant conditioning. The names are derived partly from the major learning mechanisms highlighted by each type, which I describe next.

Respondent conditioning: learning new associations with prior behaviors

As originally conceived, respondent conditioning (sometimes also called classical conditioning) begins with the involuntary responses to particular sights, sounds, or other sensations (Lavond, 2003). When I receive an injection from a nurse or doctor, for example, I cringe, tighten my muscles, and even perspire a bit. Whenever a contented, happy baby looks at me, on the other hand, I invariably smile in response. I cannot help myself in either case; both of the responses are automatic. In humans as well as other animals, there is a repertoire or variety of such specific, involuntary behaviors. At the sound of a sudden loud noise, for example, most of us show a “startle” response—we drop what we are doing (sometimes literally!), our heart rate shoots up temporarily, and we look for the source of the sound. Cats, dogs and many other animals (even fish in an aquarium) show similar or equivalent responses.

Involuntary stimuli and responses were first studied systematically early in the twentieth-century by the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov (1927). Pavlov’s most well-known work did not involve humans, but dogs, and specifically their involuntary tendency to salivate when eating. He attached a small tube to the side of dogs’ mouths that allowed him to measure how much the dogs salivated when fed ( Exhibit 1 shows a photograph of one of Pavlov’s dogs). But he soon noticed a “problem” with the procedure: as the dogs gained experience with the experiment, they often salivated before they began eating. In fact the most experienced dogs sometimes began salivating before they even saw any food, simply when Pavlov himself entered the room! The sight of the experimenter, which had originally been a neutral experience for the dogs, became associated with the dogs’ original salivation response. Eventually, in fact, the dogs would salivate at the sight of Pavlov even if he did not feed them.

This change in the dogs’ involuntary response, and especially its growing independence from the food as stimulus, eventually became the focus of Pavlov’s research. Psychologists named the process respondent conditioning because it describes changes in responses to stimuli (though some have also called it “classical conditioning” because it was historically the first form of behavioral learning to be studied systematically). Respondent conditioning has several elements, each with a special name. To understand these, look at and imagine a dog (perhaps even mine, named Ginger) prior to any conditioning. At the beginning Ginger salivates (an unconditioned response (UR) ) only when she actually tastes her dinner (an unconditioned stimulus (US) ). As time goes by, however, a neutral stimulus—such as the sound of opening a bag containing fresh dog food

—is continually paired with the eating/tasting experience. Eventually the neutral stimulus becomes able to elicit salivation even before any dog food is offered to Ginger, or even if the bag of food is empty! At this point the neutral stimulus is called a conditioned stimulus (UCS) and the original response is renamed as a conditioned response (CR). Now, after conditioning, Ginger salivates merely at the sound of opening any large bag, regardless of its contents. (I might add that Ginger also engages in other conditioned responses, such as looking hopeful and following me around the house at dinner time.)

Exhibit 1: Classical conditioning of Ginger, the dog. Before conditioning, Ginger salivates only to the taste of food and the bell has no effect. After conditioning, she salivates even when the bell is presented by itself.

Respondent Conditioning and Students

“OK,” you may be thinking, “Respondent conditioning may happen to animals. But does anything like it happen in classrooms?” It might seem like not much would, since teaching is usually about influencing students’ conscious words and thoughts, and not their involuntary behaviors. But remember that schooling is not just about encouraging thinking and talking. Teachers, like parents and the public, also seek positive changes in students’ attitudes and feelings—attitudes like a love for learning, for example, and feelings like self-confidence. It turns out that respondent conditioning describes these kinds of changes relatively well.  Consider, for example, a child who responds happily whenever meeting a new person who is warm and friendly, but who also responds cautiously or at least neutrally in any new situation. Suppose further that the “new, friendly person” in question is you, his teacher. Initially the child’s response to you is like an unconditioned stimulus: you smile (the unconditioned stimulus) and in response he perks up, breathes easier, and smiles (the unconditioned response). This exchange is not the whole story, however, but merely the setting for an important bit of behavior change: suppose you smile at him while standing in your classroom, a “new situation” and therefore one to which he normally responds cautiously. Now respondent learning can occur. The initially neutral stimulus (your classroom) becomes associated repeatedly with the original unconditioned stimulus (your smile) and the child’s unconditioned response (his smile). Eventually, if all goes well, the classroom becomes a conditioned stimulus in its own right: it can elicit the child’s smiles and other “happy behaviors” even without your immediate presence or stimulus. Exhibit 2 diagrams the situation graphically. When the change in behavior happens, you might say that the child has “learned” to like being in your classroom. Truly a pleasing outcome for both of you!

Exhibit 2: Respondent conditioning of student to classroom.

Before Conditioning:

(UCS)  Seeing Teacher Smile →       Student Smiles (UR) (UCS) Seeing Classroom    → No response (UR)

During Conditioning:

Seeing Teaching Smile + Seeing Classroom → Student Smiles

After Conditioning:

(CS) Seeing Classroom → Student Smiles (CR)

Exhibit 2: Respondent conditioning of student to classroom. Before conditioning, the student smiles only when he sees the teacher smile, and the sight of the classroom has no effect. After conditioning, the student smiles at the sight of the classroom even without the teacher present.

But less positive or desirable examples of respondent conditioning also can happen. Consider a modification of the example that I just gave. Suppose the child that I just mentioned did not have the good fortune of being placed in your classroom. Instead he found himself with a less likeable teacher, whom we could simply call Mr Horrible. Instead of smiling a lot and eliciting the child’s unconditioned “happy response”, Mr Horrible often frowns and scowls at the child. In this case, therefore, the child’s initial unconditioned response is negative: whenever Mr Horrible directs a frown or scowl at the child, the child automatically cringes a little, his eyes widen in fear, and his heart beat races. If the child sees Mr Horrible doing most of his frowning and scowling in the classroom, eventually the classroom itself will acquire power as a negative conditioned stimulus. Eventually, that is, the child will not need Mr Horrible to be present in order to feel apprehensive; simply being in the classroom will be enough. Exhibit 3 diagrams this unfortunate situation. Obviously it is an outcome to be avoided, and in fact does not usually happen in such an extreme way. But hopefully it makes the point: any stimulus that is initially neutral, but that gets associated with an unconditioned stimulus and response, can eventually acquire the ability to elicit the response by itself. Anything —whether it is desirable or not.

Exhibit 3: Respondent conditioning of student to classroom.

( UCS) Mr Horrible Frowns → Student Cringes (UCR)

Mr Horrible’s Classroom → No response

Mr Horrible Frowns + Sight of Classroom → Student Cringes

( CS) Seeing Classroom → Student Cringes ( CR)

Exhibit 3: Respondent conditioning of student to classroom. Before conditioning, the student cringes only when he sees Mr Horrible smile, and the sight of the classroom has no effect. After conditioning, the student cringes at the sight of the classroom even without Mr Horrible present.

The changes described in these two examples are important because they can affect students’ attitude about school, and therefore also their motivation to learn. In the positive case, the child becomes more inclined to please the teacher and to attend to what he or she has to offer; in the negative case, the opposite occurs. Since the changes in attitude happen “inside” the child, they are best thought of as one way that a child can acquire i intrinsic motivation , meaning a desire or tendency to direct attention and energy in a particular way that originates from the child himself or herself. Intrinsic motivation is sometimes contrasted to extrinsic motivation, a tendency to direct attention and energy that originates from outside of the child. As we will see, classical conditioning can influence students’ intrinsic motivation in directions that are either positive or negative. As you might suspect, there are other ways to influence motivation as well. Many of these are described in Chapter 7 (“Student motivation”). First, though, let us look at three other features of classical conditioning that complicate the picture a bit, but also render conditioning a bit more accurate, an appropriate description of students’ learning.

Three key ideas about respondent conditioning

Extinction: This term does not refer to the fate of dinosaurs, but to the disappearance of a link between the conditioned stimulus and the conditioned response. Imagine a third variation on the conditioning “story” described above. Suppose, as I suggested above, that the child begins by associating your happy behaviors—your smiles—to his being present in the classroom, so that the classroom itself becomes enough to elicit his own smiles. But now suppose there is a sad turn of events: you become sick and must therefore leave the classroom in the middle of the school year. A substitute is called in who is not Mr Horrible, but simply someone who is not very expressive, someone we can call Ms Neutral. At first the child continues to feel good (that is, to smile) whenever present in the classroom. But because the link between the classroom and your particular smile is no longer repeated or associated, the child’s response gradually extinguishes, or fades until it has disappeared entirely. In a sense the child’s initial learning is “unlearned”. Extinction can also happen with negative examples of classical conditioning. If Mr Horrible leaves mid-year (perhaps because no one could stand working with him any longer!), then the child’s negative responses (cringing, eyes widening, heart beat racing, and so on) will also extinguish eventually. Note, though, that whether the conditioned stimulus is positive or negative, extinction does not happen suddenly or immediately, but unfolds over time. This fact can sometimes obscure the process if you are a busy teacher attending to many students.

Generalization: When Pavlov studied conditioning in dogs, he noticed that the original conditioned stimulus was not the only neutral stimulus that elicited the conditioned response. If he paired a particular bell with the sight of food, for example, so that the bell became a conditioned stimulus for salivation, then it turned out that other bells, perhaps with a different pitch or type or sound, also acquired some ability to trigger salivation—though not as much as the original bell. Psychologists call this process generalization, or the tendency for similar stimuli to elicit a conditioned response. The child being conditioned to your smile, for example, might learn to associate your smile not only with being present in your classroom, but also to being present in other, similar classrooms. His conditioned smiles may be strongest where he learned them initially (that is, in your own room), but nonetheless visible to a significant extent in other teachers’ classrooms. To the extent that this happens, he has generalized his learning. It is of course good news; it means that we can say that the child is beginning to “learn to like school” in general, and not just your particular room. Unfortunately, the opposite can also happen: if a child learns negative associations from Mr Horrible, the child’s fear, caution, and stress might generalize to other classrooms as well. The lesson for teachers is therefore clear: we have a responsibility, wherever possible, to make classrooms pleasant places to be.

Discrimination: Generalization among similar stimuli can be reduced if only one of the similar stimuli is associated consistently with the unconditioned response, while the others are not. When this happens, psychologists say that discrimination learning has occurred, meaning that the individual has learned to distinguish or respond differently to one stimulus than to another. From an educational point of view, discrimination learning can be either desirable or not, depending on the particulars of the situation. Imagine again (for the fourth time!) the child who learns to associate your classroom with your smiles, so that he eventually produces smiles of his own whenever present in your room. But now imagine yet another variation on his story: the child is old enough to attend middle school, and therefore has several teachers across the day. You—with your smiles—are one, but so are Mr Horrible and Ms Neutral. At first the child may generalize his classically conditioned smiles to the other teachers’ classrooms. But the other teachers do not smile like you do, and this fact causes the child’s smiling to extinguish somewhat in their rooms. Meanwhile, you keep smiling in your room. Eventually the child is smiling only in your room and not in the other rooms. When this happens, we say that discrimination has occurred, meaning that the conditioned associations happen only to a single version of the unconditioned stimuli— in this case, only to your smiles, and not to the (rather rare) occurrences of smiles in the other classrooms. Judging by his behavior, the child is making a distinction between your room and others.

In one sense the discrimination in this story is unfortunate in that it prevents the child from acquiring a liking for school that is generalized. But notice that an opposing, more desirable process is happening at the same time: the child is also prevented from acquiring a generalized dislike of school. The fear-producing stimuli from Mr Horrible, in particular, become discriminated from the happiness-producing smiles from you, so the child’s learns to confine his fearful responses to that particular classroom, and does not generalize them to other “innocent” classrooms, including your own. This is still not an ideal situation for the student, but maybe it is more desirable than disliking school altogether.

Operant conditioning: new behaviors because of new consequences

Instead of focusing on associations between stimuli and responses, operant conditioning focuses on how the effects of consequences on behaviors. The operant model of learning begins with the idea that certain consequences tend to make certain behaviors happen more frequently. If I compliment a student for a good comment during a discussion, there is more of a chance that I will hear comments from the student more often in the future (and hopefully they will also be good ones!). If a student tells a joke to several classmates and they laugh at it, then the student is more likely to tell additional jokes in the future and so on.

As with respondent conditioning, the original research about this model of learning was not done with people, but with animals. One of the pioneers in the field was a Harvard professor named B. F. Skinner, who published numerous books and articles about the details of the process and who pointed out many parallels between operant conditioning in animals and operant conditioning in humans (1938, 1948, 1988). Skinner observed the behavior of rather tame laboratory rats (not the unpleasant kind that sometimes live in garbage dumps). He or his assistants would put them in a cage that contained little except a lever and a small tray just big enough to hold a small amount of food. ( Exhibit 4 shows the basic set-up, which is sometimes nicknamed a “Skinner box”.) At first the rat would sniff and “putter around” the cage at random, but sooner or later it would happen upon the lever and eventually happen to press it. Presto! The lever released a small pellet of food, which the rat would promptly eat. Gradually the rat would spend more time near the lever and press the lever more frequently, getting food more frequently.

Eventually it would spend most of its time at the lever and eating its fill of food. The rat had “discovered” that the consequence of pressing the level was to receive food. Skinner called the changes in the rat’s behavior an example of operant conditioning, and gave special names to the different parts of the process. He called the food pellets the reinforcement and the lever-pressing the operant (because it “operated” on the rat’s environment). See below.

Exhibit 4: Operant conditioning with a laboratory rat

Skinner and other behavioral psychologists experimented with using various reinforcers and operants. They also experimented with various patterns of reinforcement (or schedules of reinforcement ), as well as with various cues or signals to the animal about when reinforcement was available . It turned out that all of these factors—the operant, the reinforcement, the schedule, and the cues—affected how easily and thoroughly operant conditioning occurred. For example, reinforcement was more effective if it came immediately after the crucial operant behavior, rather than being delayed, and reinforcements that happened intermittently (only part of the time) caused learning to take longer, but also caused it to last longer.

Operant conditioning and students’ learning: As with respondent conditioning, it is important to ask whether operant conditioning also describes learning in human beings, and especially in students in classrooms. On this point the answer seems to be clearly “yes”. There are countless classroom examples of consequences affecting students’ behavior in ways that resemble operant conditioning, although the process certainly does not account for all forms of student learning (Alberto & Troutman, 2005). Consider the following examples. In most of them the operant behavior tends to become more frequent on repeated occasions:

• A seventh-grade boy makes a silly face (the operant) at the girl sitting next to him. Classmates sitting around them giggle in response (the reinforcement).
• A kindergarten child raises her hand in response to the teacher’s question about a story (the operant). The teacher calls on her and she makes her comment (the reinforcement).
• Another kindergarten child blurts out her comment without being called on (the operant). The teacher frowns, ignores this behavior, but before the teacher calls on a different student, classmates are listening attentively (the reinforcement) to the student even though he did not raise his hand as he should have.
• A twelfth-grade student—a member of the track team—runs one mile during practice (the operant). He notes the time it takes him as well as his increase in speed since joining the team (the reinforcement).
• A child who is usually very restless sits for five minutes doing an assignment (the operant). The teaching assistant compliments him for working hard (the reinforcement).
• A sixth-grader takes home a book from the classroom library to read overnight (the operant). When she returns the book the next morning, her teacher puts a gold star by her name on a chart posted in the room (the reinforcement).

Hopefully these examples are enough to make four points about operant conditioning. First, the process is widespread in classrooms—probably more widespread than respondent conditioning. This fact makes sense, given the nature of public education: to a large extent, teaching is about making certain consequences for students (like praise or marks) depend on students’ engaging in certain activities (like reading certain material or doing assignments). Second, learning by operant conditioning is not confined to any particular grade, subject area, or style of teaching, but by nature happens in nearly every imaginable classroom. Third, teachers are not the only persons controlling reinforcements. Sometimes they are controlled by the activity itself (as in the track team example), or by classmates (as in the “giggling” example). A result of all of the above points is the fourth: that multiple examples of operant conditioning often happen at the same time. The skill builder for this chapter (The decline and fall of Jane Gladstone) suggests how this happened to someone completing student teaching.

Because operant conditioning happens so widely, its effects on motivation are a bit more complex than the effects of respondent conditioning. As in respondent conditioning, operant conditioning can encourage intrinsic motivation to the extent that the reinforcement for an activity can sometimes be the activity itself. When a student reads a book for the sheer enjoyment of reading, for example, he is reinforced by the reading itself; then we often say that his reading is “intrinsically motivated”. More often, however, operant conditioning stimulates both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation at the same time. The combining of both is noticeable in the examples that I listed above. In each example, it is reasonable to assume that the student felt intrinsically motivated to some partial extent, even when reward came from outside the student as well. This was because part of what reinforced their behavior was the behavior itself—whether it was making faces, running a mile, or contributing to a discussion. At the same time, though, note that each student probably was also extrinsically motivated, meaning that another part of the reinforcement came from consequences or experiences not inherently part of the activity or behavior itself. The boy who made a face was reinforced not only by the pleasure of making a face, for example, but also by the giggles of classmates. The track student was reinforced not only by the pleasure of running itself, but also by knowledge of his improved times and speeds. Even the usually restless child sitting still for five minutes may have been reinforced partly by this brief experience of unusually focused activity, even if he was also reinforced by the teacher aide’s compliment. Note that the extrinsic part of the reinforcement may sometimes be more easily observed or noticed than the intrinsic part, which by definition may sometimes only be experienced within the individual and not also displayed outwardly. This latter fact may contribute to an impression that sometimes occurs, that operant conditioning is really just “bribery in disguise”, that only the external reinforcements operate on students’ behavior. It is true that external reinforcement may sometimes alter the nature or strength of internal (or intrinsic) reinforcement, but this is not the same as saying that it destroys or replaces intrinsic reinforcement. But more about this issue later! (See especially Chapter 7, “Student motivation”.)

Comparing operant conditioning and respondent conditioning: Operant conditioning is made more complicated, but also more realistic, by many of the same concepts as used in respondent conditioning. In most cases, however, the additional concepts have slightly different meanings in each model of learning. Since this circumstance can make the terms confusing, let me explain the differences for three major concepts used in both models—extinction, generalization, and discrimination. Then I will comment on two additional concepts— schedules of reinforcement and cues—that are sometimes also used in talking about both forms of conditioning, but that are important primarily for understanding operant conditioning. The explanations and comments are also summarized in Table 3  .

Table 3: Comparison of terms common to operant and respondent conditioning

In both respondent and operant conditioning, extinction refers to the disappearance of “something”. In operant conditioning, what disappears is the operant behavior because of a lack of reinforcement. A student who stops receiving gold stars or compliments for prolific reading of library books, for example, may extinguish (i.e. decrease or stop) book-reading behavior. In respondent conditioning, on the other hand, what disappears is association between the conditioned stimulus (the CS) and the conditioned response (CR). If you stop smiling at a student, then the student may extinguish her association between you and her pleasurable response to your smile, or between your classroom and the student’s pleasurable response to your smile.

In both forms of conditioning, generalization means that something “extra” gets conditioned if it is somehow similar to “something”. In operant conditioning, the extra conditioning is to behaviors similar to the original operant . If getting gold stars results in my reading more library books, then I may generalize this behavior to other similar activities, such as reading the newspaper, even if the activity is not reinforced directly. In respondent conditioning, however, the extra conditioning refers to stimuli similar to the original conditioned stimulus. If I am a student and I respond happily to my teacher’s smiles, then I may find myself responding happily to other people (like my other teachers) to some extent, even if they do not smile at me. Generalization is a lot like the concept of transfer that I discussed early in this chapter, in that it is about extending prior learning to new situations or contexts. From the perspective of operant conditioning, though, what is being extended (or “transferred” or generalized) is a behavior, not knowledge or skill.

In both forms of conditioning, discrimination means learning not to generalize. In operant conditioning, though, what is not being overgeneralized is the operant behavior. If I am a student who is being complimented (reinforced) for contributing to discussions, I must also learn to discriminate when to make verbal contributions from when not to make verbal contributions—such as when classmates or the teacher are busy with other tasks. In respondent conditioning, what are not being overgeneralized are the conditioned stimuli that elicit the conditioned response. If I, as a student, learn to associate the mere sight of a smiling teacher with my own happy, contented behavior, then I also have to learn not to associate this same happy response with similar, but slightly different sights, such as a teacher looking annoyed.

In both forms of conditioning, the schedule of reinforcement refers to the pattern or frequency by which “something” is paired with “something else”. In operant conditioning, what is being paired is the pattern by which reinforcement is linked with the operant. If a teacher praises me for my work, does she do it every time, or only sometimes? Frequently or only once in awhile? In respondent conditioning, however, the schedule in question is the pattern by which the conditioned stimulus is paired with the unconditioned stimulus. If I am student with Mr Horrible as my teacher, does he scowl every time he is in the classroom, or only sometimes? Frequently or rarely?

Behavioral psychologists have studied schedules of reinforcement extensively (for example, Ferster, et al., 1997; Mazur, 2005), and found a number of interesting effects of different schedules. For teachers, however, the most important finding may be this: partial or intermittent schedules of reinforcement generally cause learning to take longer, but also cause extinction of learning to take longer. This dual principle is important for teachers because so much of the reinforcement we give is partial or intermittent. Typically, if I am teaching, I can compliment a student a lot of the time, for example, but there will inevitably be occasions when I cannot do so because I am busy elsewhere in the classroom. For teachers concerned both about motivating students and about minimizing inappropriate behaviors, this is both good news and bad. The good news is that the benefits of my praising students’ constructive behavior will be more lasting, because they will not extinguish their constructive behaviors immediately if I fail to support them every single time they happen. The bad news is that students’ negative behaviors may take longer to extinguish as well, because those too may have developed through partial reinforcement. A student who clowns around inappropriately in class, for example, may not be “supported” by classmates’ laughter every time it happens, but only some of the time. Once the inappropriate behavior is learned, though, it will take somewhat longer to disappear even if everyone—both teacher and classmates—make a concerted effort to ignore (or extinguish) it.

Finally, behavioral psychologists have studied the effects of cues. In operant conditioning, a cue is a stimulus that happens just prior to the operant behavior and that signals that performing the behavior may lead to reinforcement. Its effect is much like discrimination learning in respondent conditioning, except that what is “discriminated” in this case is not a conditioned behavior that is reflex-like, but a voluntary action, the operant. In the original conditioning experiments, Skinner’s rats were sometimes cued by the presence or absence of a small electric light in their cage. Reinforcement was associated with pressing a lever when, and only when, the light was on. In classrooms, cues are sometimes provided by the teacher or simply by the established routines of the class. Calling on a student to speak, for example, can be a cue that if the student does say something at that moment, then he or she may be reinforced with praise or acknowledgment. But if that cue does not occur—if the student is not called on—speaking may not be rewarded. In more everyday, non-behaviorist terms, the cue allows the student to learn when it is acceptable to speak, and when it is not.

Constructivism: changes in how students think

Behaviorist models of learning may be helpful in understanding and influencing what students do, but teachers usually also want to know what students are thinking, and how to enrich what students are thinking. For this goal of teaching, some of the best help comes from constructivism, which is a perspective on learning focused on how students actively create (or “construct”) knowledge out of experiences. Constructivist models of learning differ about how much a learner constructs knowledge independently, compared to how much he or she takes cues from people who may be more of an expert and who help the learner’s efforts (Fosnot, 2005; Rockmore, 2005). For convenience these are called psychological constructivism and social constructivism, even though both versions are in a sense explanations about thinking within individuals.

Psychological constructivism: the independent investigator

The main idea of psychological constructivism is that a person learns by mentally organizing and reorganizing new information or experiences. The organization happens partly by relating new experiences to prior knowledge that is already meaningful and well understood. Stated in this general form, individual constructivism is sometimes associated with a well-known educational philosopher of the early twentieth century, John Dewey (1938-1998). Although Dewey himself did not use the term constructivism in most of his writing, his point of view amounted to a type of constructivism, and he discussed in detail its implications for educators. He argued, for example, that if students indeed learn primarily by building their own knowledge, then teachers should adjust the curriculum to fit students’ prior knowledge and interests as fully as possible. He also argued that a curriculum could only be justified if it related as fully as possible to the activities and responsibilities that students will probably have later, after leaving school. To many educators these days, his ideas may seem merely like good common sense, but they were indeed innovative and progressive at the beginning of the twentieth century.

A more recent example of psychological constructivism is the cognitive theory of Jean Piaget (Piaget, 2001; Gruber & Voneche, 1995). Piaget described learning as interplay between two mental activities that he called assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the interpretation of new information in terms of pre-existing concepts, information or ideas. A preschool child who already understands the concept of bird, for example, might initially label any flying object with this term—even butterflies or mosquitoes. Assimilation is therefore a bit like the idea of generalization in operant conditioning, or the idea of transfer described at the beginning of this chapter. In Piaget’s viewpoint, though, what is being transferred to a new setting is not simply a behavior (Skinner’s “operant” in operant conditioning), but a mental representation for an object or experience.

Assimilation operates jointly with accommodation, which is the revision or modification of pre-existing concepts in terms of new information or experience. The preschooler who initially generalizes the concept of bird to include any flying object, for example, eventually revises the concept to include only particular kinds of flying objects, such as robins and sparrows, and not others, like mosquitoes or airplanes. For Piaget, assimilation and accommodation work together to enrich a child’s thinking and to create what Piaget called cognitive equilibrium , which is a balance between reliance on prior information and openness to new information. At any given time, cognitive equilibrium consists of an ever-growing repertoire of mental representations for objects and experiences. Piaget called each mental representation a schema (all of them together—the plural—was called schemata ). A schema was not merely a concept, but an elaborated mixture of vocabulary, actions, and experience related to the concept. A child’s schema for bird, for example, includes not only the relevant verbal knowledge (like knowing how to define the word “bird”), but also the child’s experiences with birds, pictures of birds, and conversations about birds. As assimilation and accommodation about birds and other flying objects operate together over time, the child does not just revise and add to his vocabulary (such as acquiring a new word, “butterfly”), but also adds and remembers relevant new experiences and actions. From these collective revisions and additions the child gradually constructs whole new schemata about birds, butterflies, and other flying objects. In more everyday (but also less precise) terms, Piaget might then say that “the child has learned more about birds”.

Learning According to Piaget:Assimilation + Accommodation → Equilibrium → Schemata The upper part of Exhibit 5 diagrams the relationships among the Piagetian version of psychological constructivist learning. Note that the model of learning in the Exhibit is rather “individualistic”, in the sense that it does not say much about how other people involved with the learner might assist in assimilating or accommodating information. Parents and teachers, it would seem, are left lingering on the sidelines, with few significant responsibilities for helping learners to construct knowledge. But the Piagetian picture does nonetheless imply a role for helpful others: someone, after all, has to tell or model the vocabulary needed to talk about and compare birds from airplanes and butterflies! Piaget did recognize the importance of helpful others in his writings and theorizing, calling the process of support or assistance social transmission. But he did not emphasize this aspect of constructivism. Piaget was more interested in what children and youth could figure out on their own, so to speak, than in how teachers or parents might be able to help the young to figure out (Salkind, 2004). Partly for this reason, his theory is often considered less about learning and more about development, which is long-term change in a person resulting from multiple experiences. For the same reason, educators have often found Piaget’s ideas especially helpful for thinking about students’ readiness to learn, another one of the lasting educational issues that I discussed at the beginning of this chapter. I will therefore return to Piaget later to discuss development and its importance for teaching in more detail.

Exhibit 5: Constructivist models of learning

Learning According to Piaget:

Assimilation + Accommodation → Equilibrium → Schemata

Learning According to Vygotsky:

Novice      → Zone of Proximal Development ← Expert (ZPD)

Social Constructivism: assisted performance

Unlike Piaget’s rather individually oriented version of constructivism, some psychologists and educators have explicitly focused on the relationships and interactions between a learner and more knowledgeable and experienced individuals. One early expression of this viewpoint came from the American psychologist Jerome Bruner (1960, 1966, 1996), who became convinced that students could usually learn more than had been traditionally expected as long as they were given appropriate guidance and resources. He called such support instructional scaffolding — literally meaning a temporary framework, like one used in constructing a building, that allows a much stronger structure to be built within it. In a comment that has been quoted widely (and sometimes disputed), he wrote: “We [constructivist educators] begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.” (1960, p. 33). The reason for such a bold assertion was Bruner’s belief in scaffolding—his belief in the importance of providing guidance in the right way and at the right time. When scaffolding is provided, students seem more competent and “intelligent,” and they learn more.

Similar ideas were proposed independently by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978), whose writing focused on how a child’s or novice’s thinking is influenced by relationships with others who are more capable, knowledgeable, or expert than the learner. Vygotsky proposed that when a child (or any novice) is learning a new skill or solving a new problem, he or she can perform better if accompanied and helped by an expert than if performing alone—though still not as well as the expert. Someone who has played very little chess, for example, will probably compete against an opponent better if helped by an expert chess player than if competing alone against an opponent. Vygotsky called the difference between solo performance and assisted performance the zone of proximal development (or ZPD for short)—meaning the place or area (figuratively speaking) of immediate change. From this perspective learning is like assisted performance (Tharp & Gallimore, 1991). Initially during learning, knowledge or skill is found mostly “in” the expert helper. If the expert is skilled and motivated to help, then the expert arranges experiences that allow the novice to practice crucial skills or to construct new knowledge. In this regard the expert is a bit like the coach of an athlete—offering help and suggesting ways of practicing, but never doing the actual athletic work himself or herself. Gradually, by providing continued experiences matched to the novice learner’s emerging competencies, the expert-coach makes it possible for the novice or apprentice to appropriate (or make his or her own) the skills or knowledge that originally resided only with the expert. These relationships are diagrammed in the lower part of Exhibit 5 .

In both the psychological and social versions of constructivist learning, the novice is not really “taught” so much as just allowed to learn. The social version of constructivism, however, highlights the responsibility of the expert for making learning possible. He or she must not only have knowledge and skill, but also know how to arrange experiences that make it easy and safe for learners to gain knowledge and skill themselves. These requirements sound, of course, a lot like the requirements for classroom teaching. In addition to knowing what is to be learned, the expert (i.e. the teacher) also has to break the content into manageable parts, offer the parts in a sensible sequence, provide for suitable and successful practice, bring the parts back together again at the end, and somehow relate the entire experience to knowledge and skills already meaningful to the learner. But of course, no one said that teaching is easy!

Implications of constructivism for teaching

Fortunately there are strategies that teachers can use for giving students this kind of help—in fact they constitute a major portion of this book, and are a major theme throughout the entire preservice teacher education programs. For now, let me just point briefly to two of them, saving a complete discussion for later. One strategy that teachers often find helpful is to organize the content to be learned as systematically as possible, because doing this allows the teacher to select and devise learning activities that are more effective. One of the most widely used frameworks for organizing content, for example, is a classification scheme proposed by the educator Benjamin Bloom, published with the somewhat imposing title of Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Handbook #1: Cognitive Domain (Bloom, et al., 1956; Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Bloom’s taxonomy , as it is usually called, describes six kinds of learning goals that teachers can in principle expect from students, ranging from simple recall of knowledge to complex evaluation of knowledge. (The levels are defined briefly in Table 2.3 with examples from Goldilocks and the Three Bears .)

Bloom’s taxonomy makes useful distinctions among possible kinds of knowledge needed by students, and therefore potentially helps in selecting activities that truly target students’ “zones of proximal development” in the sense meant by Vygotsky. A student who knows few terms for the species studied in biology unit (a problem at Bloom’s knowledge and comprehension levels), for example, may initially need support at remembering and defining the terms before he or she can make useful comparisons among species (Bloom’s analysis level). Pinpointing the most appropriate learning activities to accomplish this objective remains the job of the teacher- expert (that’s you ), but the learning itself has to be accomplished by the student. Put in more social constructivist terms, the teacher arranges a zone of proximal development that allows the student to compare species successfully, but the student still has to construct or appropriate the comparisons for him or herself.

Table 4: Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives: cognitive domain

A second strategy may be coupled with the first. As students gain experience as students, they become able to think about how they themselves learn best, and you (as the teacher) can encourage such self-reflection as one of your goals for their learning. These changes allow you to transfer some of your responsibilities for arranging learning to the students themselves. For the biology student mentioned above, for example, you may be able not only to plan activities that support comparing species, but also to devise ways for the student to think about how he or she might learn the same information independently. The resulting self-assessment and self-direction of learning often goes by the name of metacognition —an ability to think about and regulate one’s own thinking (Israel, 2005). Metacognition can sometimes be difficult for students to achieve, but it is an important goal for social constructivist learning because it gradually frees learners from dependence on expert teachers to guide their learning. Reflective learners, you might say, become their own expert guides. Like with using Bloom’s taxonomy, though, promoting metacognition and self-directed learning is important enough that I will come back to it later in more detail (especially in Chapter 10, “Facilitating complex thinking”).

By assigning a more visible role to expert helpers—and by implication also to teachers—than does the psychological constructivism, social constructivism is seemingly more complete as a description of what teachers usually do in classrooms, and of what they usually hope students will experience there. As we will see in the next chapter, however, there are more uses to a theory than whether it describes the moment-to-moment interactions between teacher and students. As I explain there, some theories can be helpful for planning instruction rather than for doing it. It turns out that this is the case for psychological constructivism, which offers important ideas about the appropriate sequencing of learning and development. This fact makes the psychological constructivism valuable in its own way, even though it (and a few other learning theories as well) seem to “omit” mentioning teachers, parents, or experts in detail. So do not make up your mind about the relative merits of different learning theories yet!

Chapter summary

Although the term learning has many possible meanings, the term as used by teachers emphasizes its relationship to curriculum, to teaching, and to the issues of sequencing, readiness, and transfer. Viewed in this light, the two major psychological perspectives of learning—behaviorist and constructivist—have important ideas to offer educators. Within the behaviorist perspective are two major theories or models of learning, called respondent conditioning and operant conditioning. Respondent conditioning describes how previously neutral associations can acquire the power to elicit significant responses in students. Operant conditioning describes how the consequences and cues for a behavior can cause the behavior to become more frequent. In either case, from a teacher’s point of view, the learned behaviors or responses can be either desirable or unwanted.

The other major psychological perspective—constructivism—describes how individuals build or “construct” knowledge by engaging actively with their experiences. The psychological version of constructivism emphasizes the learners’ individual responses to experience—their tendency both to assimilate it and to accommodate to it. The social version of constructivism emphasizes how other, more expert individuals can create opportunities for the learner to construct new knowledge. Social constructivism suggests that a teacher’s role must include deliberate instructional planning, such as facilitated by Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives, but also that teachers need to encourage metacognition, which is students’ ability to monitor their own learning.

On the Internet

< http://seab.envmed.rochester.edu/jaba > This is the website for the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, and as such it is an excellent source of examples of how behaviorist learning principles can be applied to a wide variety of behavior-related difficulties. Any article older than one year is available in full-text, free of charge from the website. (If it is from the most recent three issues, however, you have to subscribe to the journal.)

< www.piaget.org > This is the website for the Jean Piaget Society, which in spite of its name is not just about Piaget, but about all forms of constructivist research about learning and development, including social constructivist versions. They have excellent brief publications about this perspective, available free of charge at the website, as well as information about how to find additional information.

Alberto, P. & Troutman, A. (2005). Applied behavior analysis for teachers, 7th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Anderson, L. & Krathwohl, D. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.

Bruner, J. (1960). The process of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Copple, C. & Bredekamp, S. (2006). Basics of developmentally appropriate practice. Washington, D.C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Dewey, J. (1938/1998). How we think. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Ferster, C., Skinner, B. F., Cheney, C., Morse, W., & Dews, D. Schedules of reinforcement. New York: Copley Publishing Group.

Fosnot, C. (Ed.). (2005). Constructivism: Theory, perspectives, and practice, 2nd edition. New York: Teachers College Press.

Gardner, H. (1999). Intelligence reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century. New York: Basic Books.

Gardner, H. (2006). The development and education of the mind. New York: Routledge.

Goldman, J. (2006). Web-based designed activities for young people in health education: A constructivist approach. Health Education Journal 65 (1), 14-27.

Gruber, H. & Voneche, J. (Eds.). (1995). The essential Piaget. New York: Basic Books. Israel, S. (Ed.). (2005). Metacognition in literacy learning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Lavond, D. & Steinmetz, J. (2003). Handbook of classical conditioning. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishing.

Mazur, J. (2005). Learning and behavior, 6th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Onslow, M., Menzies, R., & Packman, A. (2001). An operant intervention for early stuttering. Behavior modification 25 (1), 116-139.

Pavlov, I. (1927). Conditioned reflexes. London, UK: Oxford University Press. Piaget, J. (2001). The  psychology of intelligence. London, UK: Routledge.

Rockmore, T. (2005). On constructivist epistemology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Salkind, N. (2004). An introduction to theories of human development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Skinner, B. F. (1948). Walden Two. New York: Macmillan.

Skinner, B. F. (1988). The selection of behavior: The operant behaviorism of B. F. Skinner. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Tharp, R. & Gallimore, R. (1991). Rousing minds to life: Teaching, learning, and schooling in social context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Educational Psychology Copyright © 2019 by Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary Sutton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Process Goals: 5 Examples & How to Write These Goals

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It seems we have been conditioned to go through life setting goals for ourselves.  These goals change over time and typically become more complex or meaningful as we get older.  Sometimes, they may even be deemed necessary in order to ensure our professional success or personal well-being . 

For instance, if your doctor says you need to lose 50 lbs in order to get your blood pressure under control, you’re going to have to set a goal to do this.  Your health is at stake.  Or if your boss tells you that you need to finish a high priority project by deadline, you’ll need to complete it or else risk losing your job.

There is nothing wrong with goals. Some are by choice, while others are forced upon us. But here is the problem with many goals we set out to achieve… they are unrealistic or “larger than life” on paper.  They’re just too big ! And that makes them daunting, which conversely, sets us up for failure more times than not.

This is where process goals come into play . 

Table of Contents

What are Process Goals?  

Process goals are the small, measurable steps we take towards achieving a larger goal. It’s more about the journey, and not the final destination. Think of them as the mile markers we pass on a highway, telling us how far we’ve come and how much further there is to go.  

Process goals are ones that we have complete control over. We set the pace and allow ourselves to slow down, or even take a break, from time to time… without the risk of veering completely off course. 

Process goals are not designed to make you feel like it’s “all or nothing”… and are not meant to foster self-loathing or guilt over the hiccups or speed bumps we may encounter along the way. Process goals take our human nature into account, as well as the fact that certain things in life are not always in our control . 

The Difference Between Process and Outcome Goals

Unlike process goals, outcome goals are often not within our control because they are about the end-game or the final destination . If you’ve even seen a child trying to catch a floating leaf blowing in the wind on a Fall day… you may get an idea of what an outcome goal can feel like. It can be frustrating and not easy to get a hold of.

The truth is, even if you consider yourself an overachiever and are 100% committed to a goal, you still may stumble over an unforeseen obstacle that prevents you from getting there.  And then what? More times than not, after stumbling more times than you’d care to, you contemplate giving up … or, worse, you actually do.

Setting large goals can be a wonderful thing… and there is nothing wrong with having higher standards or dreaming big. The problem, however, comes when you don’t allow yourself to follow a roadmap to get you where you want to be.

Process goals are that roadmap . Without it, you’re playing an “all-in” game of poker… which we all know is a gamble. Sometimes the chance pays off, but most of the time we wind up worse off than when we started because we didn’t contemplate the bluff. The bluff is like a dead end, with only one way out.

When we set outcome goals, we become obsessed with the results and forget about the process that will get us there.  The thing that initially motivated us to take action can end up putting us in the wrong mindset and encouraging the wrong behaviors.

When you become too focused on the future result you want to achieve, you can actually thrust yourself backwards into a negative mindset .  For example, if your goal is “to lose 25 pounds”, rather than “to lose 25 pounds in the next 6 months”…  you are subconsciously directing your focus to the result, and diverting your attention away from the small victories . Self-fulfillment comes when you stop to acknowledge the steps you’ve taken along the way to achieve what you’ve set out to do.

This vague outcome goal has essentially convinced you that you won’t be happy until you lose 25 pounds (in record time, most likely). Thus, you are choosing to focus on what you don’t have, rather than what is within your control. You’re so busy looking ahead that you don’t appreciate what is right in front of you… the process goals.

By setting SMART and tangible goals for yourself, you’re increasing your chances of success… while also convincing yourself that following a simpler path will still lead you to where you want to go .

At the end of the day, nobody is going to ask you how long it took you to make it out to the clearing… they will just applaud the fact that you did. And so will you.

5 Examples of Process Goals

Now that you’ve got a good grasp on what process goals are, let’s go over some examples to help really drive the point home.  We’ll start with the one we just talked about.

Example #1: I will lose 25 pounds in the next 6 months.

Your process goals:

• Walk 25 or more minutes 5 days per week.
• Cut down carbohydrates to 1 meal per day, eating none after 6pm.
• Eat at least 3 servings of fruits and/or vegetables each day.
• Limit alcohol to weekends only, within moderation.
• Weigh myself at the same time each day, celebrating every pound lost.
• Each time you lose 5 pounds, allow yourself one “cheat day”.
• After 6 weeks, evaluate how things are going and journal how you’re feeling.

Example #2: I will increase my GPA this semester.

• Download a calendar app to help me stay organized.
• Schedule blocks of time to study, starting with 15-minute increments per subject. 
• From a study group.
• Eliminate all distractions while studying.
• Get enough sleep each night.
• Get fresh air 30 minutes each day.
• Do a social media detox for the semester.   

Example #3: I will spend more time with my family this year.

• I will skip lunch and leave work early one day per week to have dinner with my family.
• I will attend at least one of my son’s soccer games each week.
• We will make 1 or 2 Saturdays per month a “family movie or game night ” (depending on how old the children are).
• One night per month will be “ date night ” with my partner.
• We will take a weekend road trip 3 times this year.
• I will turn off all technology at 8pm. 
• I will use my vacation time and plan a trip over the holidays.

Example #4: I will change jobs within 18 months.

• I will update my resume over the course of one week.
• I will seek out new references.
• I will create profiles on Indeed and LinkedIn .
• I will attend 1 live or social networking event each month.
• I will send out 3-5 resumes each week.
• I will work on my interview skills .  
• I will sign up for volunteer work at least once per month.
• I will take online courses to improve my skill set.
• I will research the companies I am interested in to increase my knowledge.

Example #5: I will quit smoking in 3 months.

• I will establish a “quit date” and put it on my calendar.
• I will let family, friends and colleagues know that I am going to quit.
• I will consult with my physician re: a healthy way to detox and quit – be it gum, a patch or medication.
• I will identify my “why” for wanting to quit and create a vision board .
• I will acknowledge my “triggers” for smoking (ie, stress or alcohol) and avoid them.
• I will utilize motivational and self-help apps .
• I will take up a hobby to replace smoking.
• I will start an exercise routine.
• I will tape a picture of the damage smoking does onto every package of cigarettes, Nicorette®, etc… until I quit. 
• I will avoid public smoking areas and other smokers until after I have quit and feel ready.
• I will come up with a reward for myself once I have quit, such as a trip or new computer.

How to Create a Process Goal in 4 Steps

Step #1: Take the original goal and make it smaller.

Write down your goal in a journal and then break it down. Start by setting a timeline and work backwards . Think about what needs to be done over time to reach your goal.

Step #2: Have a margin for error.

You need to leave room for “detours” along the way. Again, life doesn’t always go according to plan. That means, you may experience some setbacks… but they should not derail your efforts entirely.  Take things one day at a time and don’t be afraid to make adjustments that work for you. 

Step #3: Come to terms with your imperfections.

Nobody is perfect. This means, you will make mistakes. You will “fall off the wagon” now and again, or be tempted at times to give up. That is ok.  What is not ok is to blame yourself for your shortcomings. You are human .  Remember that! You have set these goals with the best of intentions and it was a choice… which means you want to improve and will eventually do so .

Step #4: Celebrate the small “wins”.

Process goals are meant to guide you on your path to success . They are the stepping stones along the way, which means each one you reach should be acknowledged. Stop to pat yourself on the back and look at how far you’ve come. Every step taken is a step forward and deserves to be celebrated. 

Final Thoughts on Process Goals

Outcome goals have little to no margin for error .  Think about it… would you attempt to run a marathon at a full sprint? If you did, you’d never make it to the finish line. But if you train properly along the way, increasing your endurance and stamina over time, you’ll get there.

This is where process goals come into play. Here’s another bit of imagery for you: Outcome goals the finished puzzle. Process goals are the pieces you need to put it together.  There is no crime in setting large goals, only in demanding too much of yourself to make them happen. Any goal that is unrealistic or vague is nearly impossible to achieve.  

Learn more about setting and reaching your goals in our article on SMART goals for improving your communication .

2 thoughts on “Process Goals: 5 Examples & How to Write These Goals”

I can really relate to this article, as in the past I’ve made the mistake of constantly checking my results on projects I was working on, and of course they can vary wildly in the beginning. I have learnt from that and now stick to a daily routine of tasks that will work in the long term. It’s still tempting to check on progress, but I know it’s working everyday on small tasks that bring long term results. Of course, focus and a positive mindset is important as well:)

What a brilliant read. Thanks for sharing this 🙂

I also wrote about why is the process of learning so important? If we are getting the result, why do we have to do things in a better way?

Do read my article and let me know if you like it 🙂

Comments are closed.

Educational Goals - Definition, Examples for Students

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Educational goals and how to achieve them. An educational goal should be to assist students in realizing their potential. To ensure this occurs, educational goals must be established. Whether you are a teacher or a student, identifying what needs to be taught and how to achieve the objectives lays the groundwork for effective learning.

Below are educational goal examples and ways to achieve success through your education.

What are educational goals?

Educational objectives are statements that outline the abilities, characteristics, and competencies that students should possess when enrolled in a program or course of study. Educational objectives specify the teacher's or student's desired outcome. When defining educational goals, the areas of attitude, skills, and knowledge can be presented separately or in combination.

Why are educational goals important?

Goals are critical for academic achievement (and areas of life beyond the classroom). Establishing and monitoring objectives teaches your kid critical life skills such as planning, organization, and time management, as well as communication, self-awareness, and confidence. Goals are important for professional development.

For example, "aiming to achieve critical-thinking skills through my studies."

Educational goals and how to achieve them

Educational objectives are declarations of the abilities, competencies, and characteristics that you should acquire following completion of a course or program. It often entails defining objectives, selecting feasible short-term targets, and finally developing a strategy for accomplishing those goals.

Here are some examples of educational objectives:

• Maintain a good attitude to maintain concentration.
• Remain tenacious.

Allow time for reading.

• Time management is critical.
• Make time to unwind.
• Pursue excellence.
• Establish a robust network.
• Establish excellent study habits.
• Participate in seminars.
• Develop patience in order to accomplish your goals.
• Consider the good in order to maintain concentration.

Positive thinking can help you focus on important activities and acquire new knowledge. For example, if you approach improving your writing abilities with a good attitude, you can find it easier to stay focused since you are receptive to the experience.

Here are a few things you can do to keep a positive attitude about learning:

• Establish and monitor your personal learning objectives.
• Take control of your tension.
• Maintain an open mind to novel ideas and techniques.
• Visualize a successful outcome.
• Profit from your errors.

Remain resilient

Resilience is your capacity to adapt in the face of adversity. It is critical to recognize the obstacle or difficulty in order to devise a strategy for overcoming it. Resilience enables you to accept the situation and make efforts to resolve it while remaining optimistic.

Several strategies for increasing your resilience include the following:

• Create a feeling of meaning in your life.
• Develop confidence in your talents.
• Accept change.
• Enhance your problem-solving abilities.

Reading can help you strengthen your critical thinking abilities, which are necessary for making sound judgments. Reading forces you to think and digest information in ways that other types of enjoyment do not. You can read novels, memoirs, or diaries on any subject you choose. Take notes as you read to keep your attention focused on the material.

Here are a few suggestions to help you schedule a time to read each day:

• Reading should be done first thing in the morning or just before night.
• Maintain a magazine, newspaper, or book in your bag at all times.
• Utilize the time spent on the bus or metro to catch up on reading.
• Locate stuff that interests you.
• Create reading reminders.

Time management

To succeed, you must manage your time well. Effective time management abilities enable you to prioritize projects and finish work and assignments on time. Additionally, you should plan ahead, set aside the time necessary for assignments and projects, and maintain focus in order to make the most use of that time.

Here are some ideas for efficiently managing your time and enhancing your academic performance:

• Schedule your activities on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
• Distractions should be avoided when studying.
• Establish goals for each study session.
• Begin working on projects or activities as soon as possible.
• Construct a project plan.
• Concentrate on a single task at a time.
• Begin your day early.

Make time to unwind

Allowing yourself time to unwind might assist you in remaining focused and motivated. Allowing yourself time to pursue an interest or practice self-care can help you achieve balance in your life. When you take a break, you will often return to your job with a refreshed sense of purpose and perspective.

Here are a few suggestions for relaxation:

• Take time to rest.
• Utilize the 50/10 rule (50 minutes of work followed by a 10-minute break).
• Plan a week's worth of meals in advance.
• Schedule time for your hobbies and interests.
• Take breaks during difficult projects.

Pursue excellence

You should strive for excellence in your work by setting and exceeding goals. Excellence is about striving to be better, with the goal of providing consistent quality work. To achieve excellence, you need to spend time practicing and developing new skills.

Here are a few tips to develop the habit of excellence:

• Explore new ideas.
• Do more than what's expected of you.
• Take risks.
• Surround yourself with positive people.
• Build a trusted connection with a mentor.
• Build a strong network

Networking is about building and nurturing long-term relationships with the people you meet. When you invest your time in building meaningful relationships—personal and professional—you create a network you can rely on throughout your career.

Networking allows you to develop and improve your skillset, stay up-to-date with the job market, meet prospective mentors and gain access to resources that can promote your development.

Here are a few tips to build a strong network :

• Take the first step by reaching out.
• Listen to advice and tips.
• Treat people with dignity and respect.
• Learn to trust more.
• Give and take constructive feedback.
• Have empathy.

Build good study habits

One of the most important parts of academic success is practicing good study habits. Developing and maintaining good study habits can increase your competence, confidence, and self-esteem. It can also reduce your anxiety about deadlines and tests. You can also be able to reduce the number of hours spent studying, leaving more time for other important things in your life.

Here are a few steps you can take to build good study habits:

• Plan when you are going to study.
• Create a consistent, daily study routine.
• Set a study session goal to help achieve your overall academic goal.
• Avoid procrastination.
• Create an environment conducive to studying.
• Spread material throughout several study sessions.

Attend seminars or training

A seminar is an expert-led educational meeting that focuses on a specific topic or discipline. Seminars are an ideal opportunity for you to study a topic in-depth. By asking questions, paying attention to the speaker, and writing notes, you can leave a seminar with a wide range of knowledge in a specific field.

Along with having access to experts, seminars also allow you to meet other people who share your interests and build connections. Seminar discussions give you an opportunity to debate issues related to the field, exchange ideas, and share experiences. Meeting new people can offer solutions to common problems, encouragement, and advice for how to handle challenges.

Develop patience to achieve your goals

Being patient can help you realize that consistent reflection and hard work can produce successful outcomes. Many goals that you need to reach often take time and patience can help you continually produce excellent work.

Here are a few tips to overcome impatience:

• Be more mindful of your thoughts and reactions to what is going on around you.
• Calm your mind so that you can think more clearly about your situation.
• Practice deep breathing and mindfulness techniques.
• Set milestones and reward yourself when you reach them.

Educational goals examples

Your educational goals will be as unique as you are. However, the following examples will assist you in creating your own. It is OK to include goals for activities that you currently perform. For instance, if you maintain a precise schedule, you can choose to establish a goal of sticking to it even when it gets tough. Bear in mind that when presented as an educational objective, your own educational goals will become a reality much more quickly and easily.

Establish attainable objectives

Goals must be precise in defining what you intend to accomplish while also taking into account the direction in which you are headed. Additionally, you must evaluate which talents and abilities will aid you in achieving your objectives. Setting unrealistic objectives that are irrelevant to your ultimate ambitions will only result in dissatisfaction.

Create a timetable and a schedule based on reality

Establishing deadlines for completing each educational objective can help you stay on track. Create an annual calendar as well as a semester, quarterly, or monthly schedules. Then create a weekly schedule for the next week. Your weekly schedule should remain largely the same until something unexpected occurs, such as the beginning of additional classes. Include class and study time, as well as normal food and sleep times and downtime. Adjust your schedule as necessary, but avoid avoiding jobs you dislike.

Positivity and confidence

Once you've established attainable and realistic goals, approach them optimistically, and you'll find it much simpler to achieve them. Consider each objective as a challenge and refrain from obsessing over the actions necessary to achieve it. This alleviates tension and assists in avoiding despondency.

Investigate new activities

When setting your goals, remember to provide time for experimentation. Learn a new sport, try a new type of fitness, or delve into an area of interest that has piqued your curiosity. This keeps the mind and body active and invigorated, while also instilling a feeling of adventure.

Make contact with others

We do not dwell in solitary confinement. Make contact with your peers, and consider creating a study group. Develop a relationship with your roommate, if you have one. Bear in mind that your family can also serve as a support network; maintain contact with them and even incorporate family time into your planned calendar.

Continue to be determined

Not everyone and everything will support your educational objectives. Ignore unfavorable remarks, keeping in mind that you know what your goal is and have established a feasible path to accomplishing it. If necessary, avoid those who are critical of your efforts.

Recognize failure and proceed

Very successful people will readily admit to having failed, frequently several times. We gain knowledge through our errors and failures. Consider each setback as a chance for reassessment. Occasionally, we must make adjustments to our objectives, timetables, and plans in order to attain success.

Develop patience

Anything worthwhile requires time. That is why your calendars comprise a longer-term program, a shorter-term schedule, and a weekly schedule. Concentrate on the next job at hand and avoid becoming overly concerned with the amount of work required to attain each goal. Utilizing a checklist for projects and tasks might assist you in focusing on the next job at hand.

Avoid excessive working

There is such a thing as excessive labour. Schedule pauses for yourself to avoid mental and physical weariness. You can discover that taking a brief afternoon nap rejuvenates you and permits you to sleep in later at night. Simply remember to make good relaxation choices, abstaining from alcohol and any other artificial stimulants or relaxants.

Avoid negative habits

A habit is extremely difficult to break; typically, it takes approximately three weeks. It is considerably more difficult to establish a new positive habit, which typically takes two months or longer. This is another incentive to set educational objectives, as you will learn how to maintain positive habits and chores in order to accomplish them. Procrastination is one of the worst negative habits students frequently have - putting off tasks that must be completed. Again, your schedule can assist, as it provides a place to record when tasks are due and the actions necessary to complete them on time.

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About the author

Patrick Algrim is a Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW), NCDA Certified Career Counselor (CCC), and general career expert. Patrick has completed the NACE Coaching Certification Program (CCP). And has been published as a career expert on Forbes , Glassdoor , American Express , Reader's Digest , LiveCareer , Zety , Yahoo , Recruiter.com , SparkHire , SHRM.org , Process.st , FairyGodBoss , HRCI.org , St. Edwards University , NC State University , IBTimes.com , Thrive Global , TMCnet.com , Work It Daily , Workology , Career Guide , MyPerfectResume , College Career Life , The HR Digest , WorkWise , Career Cast , Elite Staffing , Women in HR , All About Careers , Upstart HR , The Street , Monster , The Ladders , Introvert Whisperer , and many more. Find him on LinkedIn .

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What Is Education? Insights from the World's Greatest Minds

Forty thought-provoking quotes about education..

Posted May 12, 2014 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

As we seek to refine and reform today’s system of education , we would do well to ask, “What is education?” Our answers may provide insights that get to the heart of what matters for 21st century children and adults alike.

It is important to step back from divisive debates on grades, standardized testing, and teacher evaluation—and really look at the meaning of education. So I decided to do just that—to research the answer to this straightforward, yet complex question.

Looking for wisdom from some of the greatest philosophers, poets, educators, historians, theologians, politicians, and world leaders, I found answers that should not only exist in our history books, but also remain at the core of current education dialogue.

In my work as a developmental psychologist, I constantly struggle to balance the goals of formal education with the goals of raising healthy, happy children who grow to become contributing members of families and society. Along with academic skills, the educational journey from kindergarten through college is a time when young people develop many interconnected abilities.

As you read through the following quotes, you’ll discover common threads that unite the intellectual, social, emotional, and physical aspects of education. For me, good education facilitates the development of an internal compass that guides us through life.

Which quotes resonate most with you? What images of education come to your mind? How can we best integrate the wisdom of the ages to address today’s most pressing education challenges?

If you are a middle or high school teacher, I invite you to have your students write an essay entitled, “What is Education?” After reviewing the famous quotes below and the images they evoke, ask students to develop their very own quote that answers this question. With their unique quote highlighted at the top of their essay, ask them to write about what helps or hinders them from getting the kind of education they seek. I’d love to publish some student quotes, essays, and images in future articles, so please contact me if students are willing to share!

What Is Education? Answers from 5th Century BC to the 21 st Century

• The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done. — Jean Piaget, 1896-1980, Swiss developmental psychologist, philosopher
• An education isn't how much you have committed to memory , or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. — Anatole France, 1844-1924, French poet, novelist
• Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. — Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013, South African President, philanthropist
• The object of education is to teach us to love beauty. — Plato, 424-348 BC, philosopher mathematician
• The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education — Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968, pastor, activist, humanitarian
• Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. Albert Einstein, 1879-1955, physicist
• It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. — Aristotle, 384-322 BC, Greek philosopher, scientist
• Education is the power to think clearly, the power to act well in the world’s work, and the power to appreciate life. — Brigham Young, 1801-1877, religious leader
• Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer – into a selflessness which links us with all humanity. — Nancy Astor, 1879-1964, American-born English politician and socialite
• Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939, Irish poet
• Education is freedom . — Paulo Freire, 1921-1997, Brazilian educator, philosopher
• Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. — John Dewey, 1859-1952, philosopher, psychologist, education reformer
• Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom. — George Washington Carver, 1864-1943, scientist, botanist, educator
• Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. — Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900, Irish writer, poet
• The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. — Sydney J. Harris, 1917-1986, journalist
• Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. — Malcolm Forbes, 1919-1990, publisher, politician
• No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. — Emma Goldman, 1869 – 1940, political activist, writer
• Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. — John W. Gardner, 1912-2002, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson
• Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. — Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1874-1936, English writer, theologian, poet, philosopher
• Education is the movement from darkness to light. — Allan Bloom, 1930-1992, philosopher, classicist, and academician
• Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know. -- Daniel J. Boorstin, 1914-2004, historian, professor, attorney
• The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values. — William S. Burroughs, 1914-1997, novelist, essayist, painter
• The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. -- Robert M. Hutchins, 1899-1977, educational philosopher
• Education is all a matter of building bridges. — Ralph Ellison, 1914-1994, novelist, literary critic, scholar
• What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul. — Joseph Addison, 1672-1719, English essayist, poet, playwright, politician
• Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today. — Malcolm X, 1925-1965, minister and human rights activist
• Education is the key to success in life, and teachers make a lasting impact in the lives of their students. — Solomon Ortiz, 1937-, former U.S. Representative-TX
• The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education. — Plutarch, 46-120AD, Greek historian, biographer, essayist
• Education is a shared commitment between dedicated teachers, motivated students and enthusiastic parents with high expectations. — Bob Beauprez, 1948-, former member of U.S. House of Representatives-CO
• The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child’s home. — William Temple, 1881-1944, English bishop, teacher
• Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them. — John Ruskin, 1819-1900, English writer, art critic, philanthropist
• Education levels the playing field, allowing everyone to compete. — Joyce Meyer, 1943-, Christian author and speaker
• Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. — B.F. Skinner , 1904-1990, psychologist, behaviorist, social philosopher
• The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers rather than to fill it with the accumulation of others. — Tyron Edwards, 1809-1894, theologian
• Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength of the nation. — John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, 35 th President of the United States
• Education is like a lantern which lights your way in a dark alley. — Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, 1918-2004, President of the United Arab Emirates for 33 years
• When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts. — Dalai Lama, spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism
• Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence . — Robert Frost, 1874-1963, poet
• The secret in education lies in respecting the student. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, essayist, lecturer, and poet
• My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance, but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors. — Maya Angelou, 1928-, author, poet

©2014 Marilyn Price-Mitchell. All rights reserved. Please contact for permission to reprint.

Marilyn Price-Mitchell, Ph.D., is an Institute for Social Innovation Fellow at Fielding Graduate University and author of Tomorrow’s Change Makers.

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Prehistoric and primitive cultures

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What was education like in ancient Athens?

How does social class affect education attainment, when did education become compulsory, what are alternative forms of education, do school vouchers offer students access to better education.

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What does education mean?

Education refers to the discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments, as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization .

Beginning approximately at the end of the 7th or during the 6th century, Athens became the first city-state in ancient Greece to renounce education that was oriented toward the future duties of soldiers. The evolution of Athenian education reflected that of the city itself, which was moving toward increasing democratization.

Research has found that education is the strongest determinant of individuals’ occupational status and chances of success in adult life. However, the correlation between family socioeconomic status and school success or failure appears to have increased worldwide. Long-term trends suggest that as societies industrialize and modernize, social class becomes increasingly important in determining educational outcomes and occupational attainment.

While education is not compulsory in practice everywhere in the world, the right of individuals to an educational program that respects their personality, talents, abilities, and cultural heritage has been upheld in various international agreements, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948; the Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1959; and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966.

Alternative forms of education have developed since the late 20th century, such as distance learning , homeschooling , and many parallel or supplementary systems of education often designated as “nonformal” and “popular.” Religious institutions also instruct the young and old alike in sacred knowledge as well as in the values and skills required for participation in local, national, and transnational societies.

School vouchers have been a hotly debated topic in the United States. Some parents of voucher recipients reported high levels of satisfaction, and studies have found increased voucher student graduation rates. Some studies have found, however, that students using vouchers to attend private schools instead of public ones did not show significantly higher levels of academic achievement. Learn more at ProCon.org.

Should corporal punishment be used in elementary education settings?

Whether corporal punishment should be used in elementary education settings is widely debated. Some say it is the appropriate discipline for certain children when used in moderation because it sets clear boundaries and motivates children to behave in school. Others say can inflict long-lasting physical and mental harm on students while creating an unsafe and violent school environment. For more on the corporal punishment debate, visit ProCon.org .

Should dress codes be implemented and enforced in education settings?

Whether dress codes should be implemented and enforced in education settings is hotly debated. Some argue dress codes enforce decorum and a serious, professional atmosphere conducive to success, as well as promote safety. Others argue dress codes reinforce racist standards of beauty and dress and are are seldom uniformly mandated, often discriminating against women and marginalized groups. For more on the dress code debate, visit ProCon.org .

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education , discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization (e.g., rural development projects and education through parent-child relationships).

(Read Arne Duncan’s Britannica essay on “Education: The Great Equalizer.”)

Education can be thought of as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a society. In this sense, it is equivalent to what social scientists term socialization or enculturation. Children—whether conceived among New Guinea tribespeople, the Renaissance Florentines, or the middle classes of Manhattan—are born without culture . Education is designed to guide them in learning a culture , molding their behaviour in the ways of adulthood , and directing them toward their eventual role in society. In the most primitive cultures , there is often little formal learning—little of what one would ordinarily call school or classes or teachers . Instead, the entire environment and all activities are frequently viewed as school and classes, and many or all adults act as teachers. As societies grow more complex, however, the quantity of knowledge to be passed on from one generation to the next becomes more than any one person can know, and, hence, there must evolve more selective and efficient means of cultural transmission. The outcome is formal education—the school and the specialist called the teacher.

As society becomes ever more complex and schools become ever more institutionalized, educational experience becomes less directly related to daily life, less a matter of showing and learning in the context of the workaday world, and more abstracted from practice, more a matter of distilling, telling, and learning things out of context. This concentration of learning in a formal atmosphere allows children to learn far more of their culture than they are able to do by merely observing and imitating. As society gradually attaches more and more importance to education, it also tries to formulate the overall objectives, content, organization, and strategies of education. Literature becomes laden with advice on the rearing of the younger generation. In short, there develop philosophies and theories of education.

This article discusses the history of education, tracing the evolution of the formal teaching of knowledge and skills from prehistoric and ancient times to the present, and considering the various philosophies that have inspired the resulting systems. Other aspects of education are treated in a number of articles. For a treatment of education as a discipline, including educational organization, teaching methods, and the functions and training of teachers, see teaching ; pedagogy ; and teacher education . For a description of education in various specialized fields, see historiography ; legal education ; medical education ; science, history of . For an analysis of educational philosophy , see education, philosophy of . For an examination of some of the more important aids in education and the dissemination of knowledge, see dictionary ; encyclopaedia ; library ; museum ; printing ; publishing, history of . Some restrictions on educational freedom are discussed in censorship . For an analysis of pupil attributes, see intelligence, human ; learning theory ; psychological testing .

Education in primitive and early civilized cultures

The term education can be applied to primitive cultures only in the sense of enculturation , which is the process of cultural transmission. A primitive person, whose culture is the totality of his universe, has a relatively fixed sense of cultural continuity and timelessness. The model of life is relatively static and absolute, and it is transmitted from one generation to another with little deviation. As for prehistoric education, it can only be inferred from educational practices in surviving primitive cultures.

The purpose of primitive education is thus to guide children to becoming good members of their tribe or band. There is a marked emphasis upon training for citizenship , because primitive people are highly concerned with the growth of individuals as tribal members and the thorough comprehension of their way of life during passage from prepuberty to postpuberty.

Because of the variety in the countless thousands of primitive cultures, it is difficult to describe any standard and uniform characteristics of prepuberty education. Nevertheless, certain things are practiced commonly within cultures. Children actually participate in the social processes of adult activities, and their participatory learning is based upon what the American anthropologist Margaret Mead called empathy , identification, and imitation . Primitive children, before reaching puberty, learn by doing and observing basic technical practices. Their teachers are not strangers but rather their immediate community .

In contrast to the spontaneous and rather unregulated imitations in prepuberty education, postpuberty education in some cultures is strictly standardized and regulated. The teaching personnel may consist of fully initiated men, often unknown to the initiate though they are his relatives in other clans. The initiation may begin with the initiate being abruptly separated from his familial group and sent to a secluded camp where he joins other initiates. The purpose of this separation is to deflect the initiate’s deep attachment away from his family and to establish his emotional and social anchorage in the wider web of his culture.

The initiation “curriculum” does not usually include practical subjects. Instead, it consists of a whole set of cultural values, tribal religion, myths , philosophy, history, rituals, and other knowledge. Primitive people in some cultures regard the body of knowledge constituting the initiation curriculum as most essential to their tribal membership. Within this essential curriculum, religious instruction takes the most prominent place.

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Updated: Jun 26, 2024, 4:51pm

No matter the size or scope of your financial goals, a financial plan can help make them a reality.

Financial planning is the process of looking at the current state of your finances and making a step-by-step plan to get it where you want it to be. That may mean devising a plan to become debt-free or figuring out how to save enough money for a down payment on a new home.

This process can include many aspects of personal finance, including investing, debt repayment, building savings, planning for retirement and even purchasing insurance.

Anyone can engage in financial planning—it’s not just for the wealthy. You can get started on making financial goals on your own, and if you choose, you can work with a financial professional to help devise the smartest plan to make those goals a reality.

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5 Steps to Create a Financial Plan

A financial plan is devised of smaller goals or tasks that will help support you along your financial journey. Create a financial plan with these five steps:

1. Identify Your Financial Goals

By identifying your financial goals, you’ll have a clear idea of what you need to accomplish to make them happen. Your goals should be realistic and actionable and include a timeline of when you want to accomplish them.

Making a goal to pay off credit card debt by a certain date, for example, would be an appropriate financial goal that will set you up for success.

2. Set a Budget

Having a clear picture of your finances will make it easier to achieve any financial goals. A budget can help you understand where your money is going each month. It can also help you identify where you may be overspending, giving you opportunities to cut back and allocate that money elsewhere.

One of the easiest budgets to start with is the 50/30/20 budget . This budget plan allocates your monthly income into three buckets: mandatory expenses (50%), savings and debt repayment (20%) and discretionary spending (30%). This is just one of many types of budgeting plans out there.

A budget should be a guide to help you understand your monthly finances and devise smaller goals that will bring you closer to your long-term financial goals. You likely won’t always follow your budget down to every single penny; keeping this in mind will help you stay on track, rather than get discouraged and give up on budgeting altogether.

There are apps out there that make budgeting much easier by helping you visualize your spending and savings choices each month. Some budgeting apps even give you the option to enter your financial goals directly into their platform to help you stay on track. A fully featured budgeting app allows you to track spending, manage recurring bill payments, set savings goals and manage your monthly cash flow.

3. Build an Emergency Fund

Building an emergency fund will help make sure that a financial emergency doesn’t become a catastrophic financial event.

Experts usually recommend having six months’ worth of living expenses saved to cushion you, should the unfortunate unexpected happen, such as losing a job. But six months’ worth of money can be unattainable for those who may be struggling financially, or those living in tight financial means each month.

You can start building an emergency fund by setting a few dollars aside each paycheck. You can start with a small fund goal of $100 to $200 to establish your fund. From there, you can create other smaller goals that will add up to a larger financial cushion. Some budgeting and savings apps also give you the option of rounding up to the nearest dollar in transactions and funnel that spare change toward your savings.

4. Reduce Your Debt

Having to make debt payments each month means you’ll have less money to allocate toward your purchase goals. Plus, carrying credit card debt can be expensive; every month, you’re accruing interest on your balance, which can make it take longer to pay off.

There are a variety of debt payoff methods out there. Two of the most popular include the debt snowball and debt avalanche methods . With the snowball method, you’ll pay off your smallest balance debts first, then make your way to the ones with the higher balances. The debt avalanche, on the other hand, starts with higher interest rate debts first.

5. Invest for the Future

Although risky, investing can help grow your money, even if you’re not wealthy. You can get started with investing by enrolling in your company’s 401(k) plan or opening a low-or-no fee account through an online broker .

Keep in mind that investing always involves some risk; you could end up losing the money you invest. There are also robo-advisors that automatically recommend investments based on your goals and risk tolerance.

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Bottom Line

A financial plan is composed of a series of smaller goals that will help you achieve a larger financial goal, such as purchasing a home or retiring comfortably. A solid financial plan includes identifying your goals, creating a budget, building an emergency fund, paying off high interest debt and investing.

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Jordan Tarver has spent seven years covering mortgage, personal loan and business loan content for leading financial publications such as Forbes Advisor. He blends knowledge from his bachelor's degree in business finance, his experience as a top performer in the mortgage industry and his entrepreneurial success to simplify complex financial topics. Jordan aims to make mortgages and loans understandable.

S R Government Polytechnic College Sagar Starts Admission Process For 3-year Diploma Courses

Curated By : Education and Careers Desk

Local News Desk

Last Updated: June 28, 2024, 18:18 IST

Delhi, India

Interested people can register till July 5.

Polytechnic College's admission in-charge S S Yadav said that there are only 40 seats in Architecture and Interior design.

Do you know if you want to apply for a post of sub-engineer directly after tenth, then you can do a three-year diploma course from S. R. Government Polytechnic College, Sagar, Madhya Pradesh? After completing a three-year diploma in Computer Science and Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications, and Fashion Technology, one can take admission in the second year of engineering for higher education. With this, one will be eligible to apply for the post of sub-engineer.

To get a diploma in architecture, one can also do a three-year diploma in architecture, interior design, and modern office management. According to reports, the process of online registration for admission to these courses has started. Interested people can register until July 5.

Online choice filling for admission will start on July 2, and students will be able to do choice filling until July 9, 2024. The entire admission process, including the verification of documents such as the online allotment letter, and certificate verification at the admitted institution, will be done from July 15 to 22, 2024.

Along with this, the Modern Office Management Course is conducted as a non-PPT course. Online registration for admission in non-PPT courses will also be done until July 5. For non-PPT, students must have passed 12th grade. This course will last for three years. In this way, the process from application to seat allocation has also been made online.

Meanwhile, giving information about admission fees and seats, Polytechnic College’s admissions in-charge, S. S. Yadav, said that there are only 40 seats in architecture and interior design. 60 seats are available in the remaining four courses. In all five courses, the tuition fee will be Rs 7500, and other fees will be Rs 817.

SC-ST students will get scholarships provided by the government. Along with this, OBC students whose income is less than Rs 8 lakh are also eligible for scholarships. A 50-seater hostel is also available here for girls. Students pursuing these courses can make their future in both the government and private sectors. For admission, one can visit the official site, dte.mponline.gov.in.

Stay ahead with all the exam results updates on News18 Website .

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