Self-regulated learning (SRL) is essential for academic success in higher education, yet many students struggle to effectively regulate their own learning behaviours. While goal-setting interventions can help students set high-quality goals as the foundation for their learning behaviours, additional supports are needed to help transition from goal setting into effective goal striving. This study examines the impact of monitoring and reflection supports, delivered through a scripted conversational agent, on students’ goal attainment, SRL skills, and academic performance. In this study, 84 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: Control, Monitoring Only, Reflection Only, or Monitoring & Reflection. Over a five-week intervention, participants engaged in weekly goal-setting activities, with additional monitoring and/or reflection prompts depending on their assigned condition. Results showed that participants in the Monitoring Only and Monitoring & Reflection conditions reported significantly higher goal attainment than those in the Reflection Only and Control groups, suggesting that monitoring plays a critical role in reinforcing goal-directed behaviour. While SRL skills improved across all conditions, no significant differences were found between groups, indicating that consistent goal setting alone may support SRL development. There were no significant effects of the intervention on academic performance. These findings highlight the immediate effectiveness of progress-monitoring activities and suggest that reflection may require longer intervention periods to have significant effects. This study supports the use of conversational agents for delivering scalable SRL support and provides insights into the design of multi-phase SRL supports in digital education.

The increasingly digital landscape of higher education has highlighted the importance of self-regulated learning in digital learning environments. To support this, academic goal setting is frequently used to enhance self-regulated learning in order to improve academic performance. Although many studies have explored the implementation of goal setting activities as behavioral modifiers, the implementation of goal setting across these studies is varied, and there is little consensus on the components which should be included and reported when studying goal setting activities. To provide an overview of the current state of the field, a systematic review was carried out examining studies which implemented academic goal setting activities within higher education over the last 14 years (2010–2024) to determine for whom, in what contexts, and how goal setting has been implemented. The results from the 60 included studies reveal a wide array of goal setting implementations covering many countries and academic disciplines. Overall, these implementations are highly heterogeneous, with large differences between studies in how goal setting is carried out. However, results also show a strong trend toward partial digitalization, with most studies using technology to deliver their goal setting activities, but very few adopting technologies for any further enhancements or support. Overall, the review reveals a focus on non-experimental studies exploring the content of student goals, with only a small selection testing the effect of goal setting in experimental studies. Based on these results we suggest future work focuses on testing the effect of goal setting, especially focusing on the interplay between the design of the activities and individual student needs, as well as further investigation of how emerging educational technologies can be used to scale and enhance goal setting activities.

Goal setting is the first and driving stage of the self-regulated learning cycle. Studies have shown that supporting goal setting is an effective means of improving academic performance among higher education students. However, doing so can be complex and resource intensive. In this study, a goal-setting conversational agent was designed and deployed to support higher education students in setting academic goals. Across 5-weeks, we tested the effects of goal-setting prompts (guided vs. unguided) and adaptive feedback (with vs. without) when delivered via a goal-setting conversational agent. We explored the effects of these supports (i.e., guidance and feedback) on students' 1) goal quality and 2) goal attainment. Findings showed that guidance and feedback combined had the largest positive effect on goal quality. They also revealed that guidance alone produced initially high-quality goals which decreased in quality overtime, whereas feedback had a delayed but cumulative effect on quality across multiple goal setting iterations. However, neither guidance nor feedback had significant effects on goal attainment, and there was no significant relationship between goal quality and attainment. This study provides insights into how a goal-setting conversational agent and adaptive feedback can be used to support the academic goal setting process for higher education students.