Poor peer work does not boost student confidence

Heather Barry Kappes, Barbara Fasolo, Wenjie Han, Jessica Barnes and Janna Ter Meer

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Students' low confidence, particularly in numerical topics, is thought to be a barrier to keeping them engaged with education. We studied the effects on confidence of exposure to a peer's work of varying quality (very good or bad) and neatness (messy or neat). Previous research underpinned our hypothesis that a peer's bad-quality work—which students rarely see—might boost student confidence more than very good work. We also predicted that a peer's very good work—which students are often shown—might be less discouraging if it were messy, suggesting it required effort and struggle. However, in experiments with university students and low-educated adults, these hypotheses were not supported, and all participants decreased in confidence after seeing any peer work. The failure to find support for these hypotheses can inform future research into social comparison effects on self-confidence in numerical topics. These results also have practical implications for teachers and managers who are expected to provide examples of peer work.

Keywords: confidence; learning; social comparison; peer comparison; self-concept of ability; numeracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 12 pages
Date: 2020-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-isf and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 1, April, 2020, 33(2), pp. 139 - 150. ISSN: 0894-3257

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/101193/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:101193

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().