Discussion
SAID
We investigated the effects of a life goal framing prompt on medical students’ autonomous and controlled motivation, learning strategy use, and knowledge retention, and the moderating effect of students’ PCL. The life goal framing prompt consisted of a single slide encouraging students to connect what they were learning to the life goals they pursue through a career in medicine.Regarding Research Question #1, we did not find any statistically significant differences between the prompt and no-prompt conditions for any outcome (i.e., autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, organizational note-taking, elaborative note-taking, metacognitive note-taking, engagement with interactive sections, engagement with questions, knowledge retention), except for a small effect on link-clicking. Therefore, we cannot at this time conclude that prompting life goal framing is an effective strategy for enhancing medical students’ autonomous motivation, learning strategy use, and knowledge retention, even when they have high confidence. However, we suggest that there is plenty of room to strengthen the effect of a prompt. We suspect that the effect of the prompt was attenuated because nearly one-third of students randomized to receive the prompt did not provide a typed reflection, and thus may not have engaged in life goal framing in the desired manner [That said, we did find a statistically significant interaction effect between condition and PCL on autonomous motivation, albeit a small effect. This interaction effect is consistent with our theoretical account of motivated engagement in learning, based on Control Theory and SDT. When learners perceive an activity as helping them accomplish their personally meaningful goals, their resultant autonomous motivation seems to By contrast, we did not find evidence for an interaction effect between condition and PCL on learning strategy use or knowledge retention. It could be that students with low 