Effects of Feedback on Motivation and Performance

University Of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by candidate): The primary goal of this study is to examine how differential praise affects the achievement thoughts and behaviors of children. Specifically, it addresses whether praise for effort, praise for ability, and praise for outcome yield different responses to failure in children of different ages (i.e., kindergartners and fourth graders) and whether any behavioral effects that are seen arise from similar or different thought processes in the two age groups. In the study, children of each age group will be assigned to one of four conditions that differ with respect to the type of praise given following an initial success experience: (1) raise for ability, (2) praise for effort, (3) praise for outcome, and (4) praise with no attributional component. After the initial success experience and praise manipulation, children will face a challenging ask and will be told that they have performed poorly. Children will provide ratings of their ability, emotional state, enjoyment of and motivation for performing the task, beliefs about the nature of intelligence and badness, and perceived causes of their performance. Then, we will assess children?s actual persistence and performance on a final experimental task. As part of the debriefing, children will be told their performance was misevaluated on the challenging task and that, in fact, they did very well.