Defining Academic Success: How Health Sciences Undergraduates Describe Success in Terms of Performance and Mastery Orientations

How students define academic success impacts their motivation and learning. Contextualizing definitions of success may be especially important for health sciences undergraduates, whose long-term career aspirations involve a balancing act between tangible outcomes and effective learning. Few studies have explored how undergraduate health sciences students define success. Gaining an understanding of these definitions takes on heightened importance in the contemporary context, where COVID-19 pandemic learning crises and other generational factors have prompted students to rethink what it means to be successful. To reveal nuances in the learning goals of today’s health sciences undergraduates, this pragmatic qualitative study used achievement goal theory as a framework to uncover how health sciences undergraduates defined academic success, and how these definitions reflected a performance or mastery orientation. Data were collected from 238 students who provided written definitions of success. Findings revealed the array of ways in which students defined success in terms of mastery (i.e., Self-Set Goals, Attitudes, Learning, and Wellbeing), performance (i.e., Grades, Behaviors, and Progress), or a combination of both. An emphasis on wellbeing within mastery definitions and woven into a broader understanding of success was a notable extension of prior findings. Implications for teaching to support academic success are discussed.