Competency and Goals

Competency

and Goals

Using self-regulation and self-determination, students can create personalized goals to reach academic achievement in the course. Our course is designed to aim for competency by challenging students to take ownership of their learning and go beyond "sitting time" or "homework time" at a pace regulated by the student. Goal-setting can harvest more awareness to measure and track progress, inviting students to create more autonomy and self-awareness in learning.

Competence

Our history course was designed so that students could personalize their own pace for learning. In previous sections, I have expanded on self-regulation as a means for motivation and reflective practice. I would now like to explore how self-regulation plays a role in challenging students to show competency in their work. As students engaged in daily "quests," they were required to show proof of their competency mainly through formative assessments like journal entries, discussion blogs between other students, badges, and written assessments. While each quest was designed to take 60 minutes, each activity had a suggested amount of time to guide students through the quests. However, students were encouraged to spend as much time to achieve competence. Therefore, there were no late penalties or points taken off for resubmissions. Each quest had different sets of standards to meet, and as the instructor, I would check for competency after submission and provide feedback. When students completed the quests, they unlocked the upcoming quest to continue to work through the course.

In the light of self-regulation, I wanted quests to be student-centered, encouraging students to spend a desired time whether their motivations were intrinsic or extrinsic. Creating this learning environment aligns with the philosophy of Competency-Based learning, where learning occurs beyond seating time and outside the classroom to meet standards for competency. (Townsley 2014)

In an interview with a student, she declares her experience with self-regulation, the challenges and benefits of learning at her own pace, and the support of the instructor through the course. She states:

"World History is an extensive and rigorous course, so I did expect a lot of work, but I didn't expect work every single day. For me, especially someone with jet-lag, it has been hard for me to adjust to the first few quests. The quests are challenging, but they are fine in terms of times; I just get confused very easily, which is why I send you a thousand questions each day. I think it's very interesting the way it's framed. I really like how you put the time next to the activity so that I can measure out how I am doing. But I like how we can all go at our own pace."

I noticed that the student found the level of rigor engaging but tasking. However, the student assured me that she had the right support system to help her self-regulate her time or effort. She was independent about navigating through the quest but was not alone as she sought me for assistance when she needed it. While she used the suggested time to spend on each activity seeking me for extra help showed additional effort to understand how to complete each quest. If quests would have had firmer time constraints, the ability to ask for extra help may have diminished. Nonetheless, as an instructor, I was please to know that she felt like I was accessible to assist.

In her case, the quests provided a sense of flexibility with her jet lag, something that she was worried about upon arrival to campus. While at the beginning it was challenging to adjust to the quests, the extensions that we as grant around set deadlines were not necessary as the student took advantage of the flexibility to work at her own pace, not rush, have more opportunities to prove competency, and aim for her best performance.

Setting Goals

As students have more control of their learning process, students can see beyond deadlines and triage to help motivate them to meet competency in quests. While I am not trying to conceptualize the types of goals or their derivatives, I can only infer the possible goals that my students tried to set in my course based on the intrinsic or extrinsic motivator set forth by the design of the course. I am referring to goals that are set properties of the individuals as individuals have the capacity to set stable and general orientations for their own learning (Nolen, 2019.) Perhaps looking at what Niemivirta, Pulkkam Tapola, and Tuomine (2019) referred to as a Person-Oriented Approach for goal-setting to be more fitting to my observation as they describe such approach as a holistic experience "which views the individual as an active agent in the person-environment system." (p. 567) Aligning this approach with self-regulation, students could develop different goals that seem internally important to them (i.e., grades, subject, performance) and the environment of gamification through its elements.

Let's take, for example, grades in our gamified course. In our GradeCraft LMS, the software application has a feature called "grade predictor."At the beginning of the course, I ask students to look at all of the assignments, select the quests they want to complete, and estimate the points they want to earn to predict their desired grade. This tool can help students set personal goals to track their progress as they move up through levels and calculate their grades.

In the special case of a struggling student who had fallen behind in her own goals, both in pace and grades, I asked her how helpful setting goals through grade predictor was. In the interview, she responded:

"At the moment, it [grade predictor] is being very helpful. I can start planning to catch up. I can go back to what specifically told myself what to do and know now exactly what to do and when to catch up."

The student had established initial personal goals to meet to define her success in the class. While in this case, her self-regulation did not allow her to meet the expectations. The grade predictor helped plan the student to redirect her self-regulation to catch up with the goals she "specially told herself" to meet to define her own success. Of course, most if not all students aimed at an "A" in the course, making it a common goal. However, that grade should not be the ultimate motivator. Given that students have more control of their pace, goal setting becomes a strategy, making those goals themselves motivators and achievements worth celebrating.

Measuring Progress

Through goal setting, students personalize the way they approach their work out of self-determination. Setting goals leads to a motivational tendency where students find the experience of learning more interesting, as the personalized goals become congruent with the learning goals established in the course (Sansone, Geerling, Thoman &.Smith, 2019).

As students regulated their own pace, I noticed students developing a greater awareness of their progress. Students saw the product of their self-regulation by meeting their personal goals. In their research, Kennedy, Freidhoff & Debruler (2015) noticed that when students' self-regulation results increased, so did their comprehension and achievement in their learning. This began to be true on our second term with gamification. Students began to take advantage of setting their goals to comprehend the material better and even set aside leisure time.

In an interview with one of my students, who sought to always be ahead of schedule by a quest or two, expressed the benefits of setting goals and her own deadlines for academic and personal reasons. She states:

"In the first term, I felt that I was always falling behind no matter how much I tried to catch up. I mean, I was on track, but the idea that I had to force myself to stay on track gave me anxiety. Now, I know what to do. I set time aside to do quests before coming to class, making me feel more prepared and not feeling behind. It's also nice because if I stay one day ahead, I get the weekends off."

While it was no requirement to complete the quest of the day before the class, the student sought the advantages of staying ahead by a day as she felt more prepared knowing where the content was heading. Her regulation also concerned her time management and mental state, as she felt that staying ahead in the quest gave her the opportunity to track her progress. She continued to express how going ahead helped her when she felt "stuck":

"When I felt stuck, I could take my time figuring it out or ask you for help. I felt I was in a good spot."

When it came to content, she expressed this comfort, as the pace regulated by her gave her the opportunity to "figure things out" and dive deeper into the material. I made myself available through instant messages in Teams, and she would ask essential questions that pertained to the subject or instructions, signaling that she was engaging in the quests. Through measuring her progress, the motivation to stay on tasks, setting her own personal dates for regulation, and taking the time to comprehend the course material allowed her to raise her chances to reach competency.