The Impact of Situational Achievement Goals on Online Learning Behavior: Results from Field Experiments

Despite their prevalence, online learning platforms have difficulty sustaining user motivation, resulting in low engagement and poor performance. Addressing this challenge, we study how these platforms can boost learner motivation by fostering an effective learning environment and inducing different situational goals. We conducted a randomized field experiment with behavioral interventions inspired by the achievement goal theory in a massive open online course with more than 2,000 learners from 171 countries. Using various econometric analyses, we estimate the effects of interventions based on three situational achievement goals: learning, performance-prove, and performance-avoidance. In contrast to the traditional (offline) education literature, which finds learning goals to be the most effective and performance goals to be inferior, we demonstrate that performance-prove goals are the most effective in enhancing online engagement and performance. We trace the roots of this finding to the differences in the structure of online and offline environments and the psychological needs of online learners. We uncover the underlying mechanism by empirically examining how situational achievement goals stimulate different achievement emotions necessary to maintain engagement in the learning process. We further find that the effectiveness of each goal depends on learners’ characteristics: prior performance and social activity. Learners with stronger prior performance benefit more from the performance-prove goal, whereas those with moderate performance levels gain from the performance-avoidance goal, and those with lower prior performance are positively influenced by the learning goal. Socially isolated learners respond best to performance goals. Through a second field experiment, we explore the optimal combination of situational goals. We find that combining learning and performance-prove goals leads to the highest learning outcomes. Our study offers theoretical contributions and practical implications for scholars and platform providers on how to effectively leverage situational achievement goals and related achievement emotions for improving online user outcomes.