Participants received feedback about their percentile after every task they did. After receiving all of the tasks, they were again assessed on their anxiety and motivation as well as their perception of their performance.
Results
Despite receiving varied feedback, there were no actual performance differences on any of the tasks. However, there were differences for perceived performance. Across all tasks, participants who received negative feedback thought they did much worse than those who received positive feedback. That’s probably not all that surprising. Being told you’re doing well makes you believe you’re doing well and vice versa. However, in addition to perceived performance, getting negative feedback also significantly increased anxiety, reduced intrinsic motivation, and increased amotivation compared to positive feedback . Those participants with higher anxiety had lower perceived performance as well.
Takeaway
These results indicate that your belief in your success on a task impacts your level of anxiety and motivation more so than your actual success! If you perceive yourself as doing poorly, it may cause you to pay more attention to your current state, feelings, and performance, and draw attention away from the task at hand.
In this study, that anxiety didn’t impact performance, but in real world situations it might. The stakes here involved maybe earning $5 for you and a peer… not terribly high stakes. But prior research has shown the impact of anxiety on performance when individuals are under pressure and there are some real world circumstances in which this might really matter.
One example that is relevant in my world is student performance on practice medical board exams. Students often want to know the median score for their class. They want to know how they are performing compared to their peers. As of right now, we do not disclose this information, stating that the purpose of these tests is to know whether you are on track to passing, not whether you are ahead of the game. These data make me even more confident in that decision. I don’t want to tell a student who is doing just fine that they are in the 30th percentile. That will increase their anxiety and reduce their motivation, which may lead to very real performance differences on the real exam, where the stakes are tremendously high.
As an educator, this indicates that student self-efficacy matters. Possibly more than their actual performance, students need to believe that they are capable and the way we provide feedback is a major contributor to that belief.
