Understanding and improving students’ self-regulated goal revision

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Maria Theobald
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 576126466

Setting and revising goals is an integral part of everyday school life, such as when children are learning new concepts. They have to decide what they want to achieve and how they want to proceed while learning. For example, they have to decide whether to practise simple or difficult tasks. It is assumed that children learn more successfully when they adapt their goals flexibly according to their abilities and progress in learning. One example of adaptive goal revision is learners choosing more difficult tasks if they achieve their goal with little effort or easier tasks if they fail to achieve their goal despite making great efforts. However, it is unclear whether children actually revise their goals regarding task difficulty based on previous performance and effort, and how this affects their learning success. There is also a lack of knowledge about how adaptive goal revision can be promoted. The project aims to improve our understanding of how children revise their goals and whether feedback can support this process. To this end, the project will investigate whether children change their goals based on previous performance and perceived effort, and how these adjustments affect learning of a scientific concept. Additionally, we will examine whether providing elaborated feedback, such as information on goal achievement and specific suggestions for goal revision, can improve this process. The project comprises two studies, involving a total of 246 children aged between eight and eleven. Self-regulated learning is becoming increasingly important for this age group, but it still varies greatly. In Study 1, the children will work through six blocks of physics tasks, each containing seven questions related to torque at different levels of difficulty. Before each set of tasks, the children set themselves a goal regarding the desired level of difficulty, ranging from 'easy' to 'difficult' (6-point scale). After each block, they assess their performance and the effort they invested. We will investigate whether children revise their goals based on their performance and effort in completing tasks, and whether this leads to greater learning gains over the course of the learning phase. In Study 2, the type of feedback is varied experimentally. Alongside a control group that only receives outcome feedback on the correct task solutions, there are three experimental groups that additionally receive either metacognitive feedback on their goal achievement, strategy suggestions for goal revision, or both. This allows us to analyse which type of feedback best supports goal revision. The results will inform support approaches for adaptive and self-regulated goal revision, taking into account different developmental prerequisites.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Garvin Brod