PhD defence D.J. (Diederick) Hudig

Below is a brief summary about the dissertation:

In my first year at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) in 2010, half of my fellow business students dropped out. At the time, these kinds of numbers were commonplace at many programs. To improve study success and combat the high dropout rates, in 2011 a goal-setting intervention became part of the Business Skills course as an assignment. This online intervention - originally from Canada - consists of a series of guided writing assignments in which students reflect on themselves, their future, and their personal life goals (Morisano et al., 2010). Research among first-year business administration students found that the student cohort that participated in this goal-setting intervention earned 22% more credits and had 20% fewer dropouts than the three student cohorts before it (Schippers et al., 2020). Male students and students from non-Western immigrant backgrounds showed improvements in study success and dropout rates of up to 50% (Schippers et al., 2015). The psychological mechanisms behind these positive effects have so far not been empirically demonstrated. The central goal of this dissertation was to understand the mechanism underlying the goal-setting intervention.

This dissertation describes four research studies. Studies 1 and 2 took place at the very beginning of the study program before students participated in the goalsetting intervention. In these studies, we mapped differences on student characteristics implicitly or explicitly related to the motivational properties of the goalsetting intervention, and for which previous research has established a direct or indirect association with study success. Studies of the goal-setting intervention have shown that the intervention is more effective for the study success of some students than others. Existing studies on the effectiveness of the intervention have focused primarily on immutable background characteristics such as gender and ethnicity as the main predictors of study achievement and dropout (e.g., Schippers et al., 2015). To gain more insight into the change mechanism underlying the goal-setting intervention, we focused on potentially changeable processes that the goal-setting intervention targets in students.