Personal best (PB) goal setting refers to the pursuit of individual improvement through striving to outperform a previous best level of performance or effort. Although promising evidence has been building, numerous empirical questions remain to be answered, including how PB goal setting may operate alongside various contextual predictors of…

Feedback is a key factor in helping individuals to self-regulate their learning behavior. Informative feedback, as a very basic form of feedback informing learners about the correctness of their answers, can be framed in different ways emphasizing either what was correct or what must be improved. The regulatory focus theory describes different…

An abundance of literature has examined barriers to women's equitable representation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, with many studies demonstrating that STEM fields are not perceived to afford communal goals, a key component of women's interest in future careers. Using Goal Congruity Theory as a framework, we tested…

There is no doubt that connections with other people motivate behavior; yet science is stereotyped as being lonely work devoid of communal connections. Drawing from self-regulation of motivation and goal congruity theories, we ask, does relationship-building in science foster communal perceptions that then increase women's persistence in and…

Financial stress and student loan debt are on the rise among today's college students. This study examined the associations between financial factors and students' college goal commitment. A multi-institutional survey was used to assess students' financial stress, estimated student loan debt, and the perceived importance of career, economic,…