Exploring the Effects of Goal Setting When Training for Complex Crowdsourcing Tasks (Extended Abstract)

Training is one way of enabling novice workers to work on complex crowdsourcing tasks. Based on goal setting theory in psychology, we conduct a randomized experiment to study whether and how setting different goals-including performance goal, learning goal, and behavioral goal-when training workers for a complex crowdsourcing task affects workers' learning perception, learning gain, and post-training performance. We find that setting different goals during training significantly affects workers' learning perception, but does not have an effect on learning gain or posttraining performance. Further, exploratory analysis helps shed light on when and why various goals may or may not work in the crowdsourcing context.