Goal Setting, Academic Reminders, and College Success: A Large-Scale Field Experiment

This article presents an independent large-scale experimental evaluation of two online goal-setting interventions. Both interventions are based on promising findings from the field of social psychology. Approximately 1,400 first-year undergraduate students at a large Canadian university were randomly assigned to complete one of two online goal-setting treatments or a control task. In addition, half of treated participants were offered the opportunity to receive follow-up goal-oriented reminders through e-mail or text messages to test a cost-effective method for increasing the saliency of treatment. Across all treatment groups, we observed no evidence of an effect on grade point average, course credits, or second-year persistence. Our estimates are precise enough to discern a 7% standardized performance effect at a 5% significance level. Our results hold by subsample, for various outcome variables, and across a number of specifications.