“How Else Could You Do that?” The effects of generating multiple means of goal attainment on female students’ perceived goal attainability

Abstract

Perceived goal attainability (PGA) is a crucial variable in education, influencing students’ goal commitment, goal pursuit and psychological wellbeing. Asking students to generate multiple means of goal attainment is thought to have a positive effect on PGA. And yet research on the “availability” heuristic suggests that difficulty in generating means of goal attainment may have a negative effect on PGA. The present study is the first to examine the matter in a real-world middle and high school context. In three experiments female students aged 11–15 were asked to generate many/few means of goal attainment. An inconsistent mediation model was hypothesised in which the “many means” condition has a negative indirect effect on perceived goal attainability through difficulty-in-generation (DIG) but a positive direct effect on the same variable. It was also hypothesised that these effects are greater in students with low baseline PGA. This moderated mediation hypothesis was supported statistically by tests of interaction in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiment 3, which involved the youngest students with the highest baseline PGA, difficulty-in-generation and the “Think of many” manipulation appeared to have much less effect, again suggesting that DIG (and “Think of many”) exert less of an influence when students’ baseline PGA is high. Results have important implications for schools, students and educators alike.