Campus Location
Abilene Campus (Residential)
Date of Award
5-2023
Document Type
Thesis
Department
Social Work
Degree Name
Master of Science
Committee Chair or Primary Advisor
Tom Winter
Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor
Rachel Slaymaker
Abstract
Student retention has been a problem with which higher education institutions must face. Institutions have employed numerous different programs and services to improve student retention. This study sought to open up a new way to improve student retention by utilizing a goal-setting intervention that focused on creating SMART goals for student areas of weaknesses. This study employed the use of a quasi-experimental interrupted time series to better understand how goal-setting interventions could impact the participant attitudes correlated to retention. It was shown that goal-setting interventions had no significant impact on likelihood of retention but did exhibit improvement in client engagement with coursework, which is a positive indicator of student retention. It was concluded that more research should be done on goal-setting and student retention to better understand the impact goal-setting has on student likelihood of retention.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Castillo, Hugh, "Goal Setting and Student Retention" (2023). Digital Commons @ ACU, Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 606.
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/etd/606