The role of personal best (PB) goals in the achievement and behavioral engagement of students with ADHD and students without ADHD

Abstract

In the context of competitive classroom settings and relativistic assessment schedules, some groups of students may particularly benefit from an emphasis on personal progress and personal growth approaches to their academic development. Building on recent promising results from general samples of high school students (undifferentiated by academically at-risk sub-groups within them) and dominant models of attention and executive functioning, the present study examines the potential of personal best (PB) goals for students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The study focuses on N=87 students with ADHD and N=3374 non-ADHD peers from the same schools and year levels – in addition to a supplementary analysis of a randomly drawn non-ADHD sub-sample of N=87 and a second supplementary analysis controlling for achievement. Multi-group multivariate path analyses demonstrated (a) significant and positive associations between PB goals and academic outcomes (achievement and behavioral engagement) for students with ADHD, (b) similar positive effects for non-ADHD students (N=3374), (d) replicated results with the randomly drawn non-ADHD sub-sample (N=87), (e) similar findings when controlling for achievement, and (f) absolute parameter estimates that trended larger for students with ADHD than non-ADHD students. These findings indicate that the positive role of PB goals may generalize across diverse student groups and that there appears to be merit in broadly promoting PB goals amongst ADHD (and, potentially, other academically at-risk students) and non-ADHD students alike.