Flexible or Concrete: Goal‐Setting Behaviours in Canadian Medical Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Active goal setting and metacognition are components of self-regulated learning, helping medical students thrive in high-pressure environments. To support self-regulated learning and well-being, we must better understand the types of goals medical students set, how they formulate goals, their metacognitive awareness of goal setting and how these factors impact well-being. The overarching objective of this study is to explore how medical students develop goal-setting behaviours and abilities. We also characterised their metacognitive ability around goal setting and probed how they felt their behaviours impacted well-being. METHODS: In this qualitative reflexive thematic analysis study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 medical students in all years from 6 Canadian medical schools. The study received ethics approval. RESULTS: Our analysis revealed three major themes around goal-setting behaviours, student metacognition and implications: (1) Students have limited awareness of their goal-setting process, preferences and the associated consequences. (2) Students' goal-setting tendencies and processes can be described by goal-setting scripts-flexible or concrete. (3) Goal-setting scripts are modified in response to external factors, occasionally leading to approaches that may be incongruent with a student's preferred goal-setting style. CONCLUSION: This research offers important insight into goal-setting behaviours of medical students. Flexible and concrete goal-setting scripts introduce another framework through which educators and learners alike can examine and reflect upon goal-setting strategies. Implications of the scripts being modified due to external drivers need to be considered to support learners. Students have limited awareness and purposiveness around their goal-setting behaviours.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".