If you have high control over the outcome, there’s no need to have general goals – you can afford to get specific. But if you have low control over the outcome, general might be better.
Vision: the level of goal awareness and goal orientation shown by a student; their growing understanding of their reasons for studying, and their developing sense of what success might look like for them.
Like any of the metacognitive characteristics in the VESPA model, vision is not a fixed, unwavering element of personality. We can’t dismiss low-vision students as permanently impossible to motivate. Students’ levels of vision, goal orientation or dedication are malleable. They change in response to circumstances, culture, events in personal or family life, conversations, sudden epiphanies or exciting lessons.
When vision is missing, we’ll see proxies for it that might include some or all of the following behaviours. Students might seem disengaged or bored. They might have little awareness or understanding of why education benefits them or what success might look like for them. They may have few or no ideas about how education opens doors to certain careers, or they might have no access to alumni programmes which clearly and persuasively show them where last year’s students ended up. They might have begun to feel exasperated with themselves and others, envious of those who seem dedicated and feel the first tremors of a growing anxiety: what am I doing this for? Why are others enjoying this and I’m not? Is there something wrong with me? They might be firm believers in the passion myth; since they don’t yet know that passion for something arrives as a result of growing mastery, they hunt around, convinced that if they could just find the one thing they’re passionate about, everything will be OK again.
It’s a complicated cocktail of difficult feelings. But we can help low-vision students navigate themselves through them.
Let’s focus on one important element of vision: goal setting. Evidence for goals positively impacting on performance is interesting to explore because not all research finds that students who set goals necessarily perform better.
For example, studies with young primary school pupils sometimes find little impact from goal setting, which we might expect when we consider their only gradually developing ability to defer gratification. But even with students of high sc
