The Effect of Precommitment on Student Achievement Within a Technology-Rich Project-Based Learning Environment

This study investigated the effects of precommitment on college students’ goal setting and academic performance, and students’ attitude towards precommitment-related activities. Precommitment refers to a procedure in which students set up learning goals, possibly with a time limit at the beginning of a learning phase, then report the comparison between their goals and actual learning progress to their peers and teachers by the end of the learning phase. This study used a single-group repeated-measures design. 41 students from a large university in the southeastern United States participated in the study. Multivariate analysis of variance indicated that precommitment was significantly effective in optimizing students’ goals and improving their academic performance, but the attitude survey result indicated that students could not fully recognize the value of precommitment-related activities.