Subjects in T2 and T3 were given forty-five minutes to complete their puzzles.
At the beginning of the actual treatment, subjects in T2 and T3 were encouraged to ask for assistance if they needed any.
T2 subjects were given positive feedback from researchers even when negative feedback was warranted, such as being unable to complete the easy puzzle in forty-five minutes. Researchers were instructed to say encouraging, affirmative things to subjects even when subjects were having no problems with the puzzles, such as "You're making fine progress!" "Good job!" "I know you can do it!" "That's looking great!" And so forth. Further, researchers were instructed to make these comments loudly enough for them to be overheard by the most distant subject.
T3 subjects' researchers were instructed to give negative feedback at every opportunity, and to make opportunities if none presented themselves with comments such as "You should be smart enough to finish that puzzle at your age!" "I can't believe you're having this much trouble with this puzzle!" "The last class had already finished their puzzles by now!" "I guess you're just not good at puzzles, huh?" Again, researchers were instructed to make these comments loudly enough for all the subjects to hear them.
After the treatment, all groups were subjected to a thirty minute vocabulary lesson and given fifteen minutes to study silently. This study period was followed by collection of the puzzles from groups T2 andT3 and toys from T1.
Having their uncompleted puzzles collected reminded the T3s of how poorly they had performed. Having their completed puzzles collected reminded the T2s of how well they had performed.
At this point, all groups were given the test, which lasted for ten minutes and consisted of fill in the blank questions. A choice set of thirty words was included, which included the original vocabulary words plus fifteen distractors.
RESULTS
Analysis of variance was performed on all...
The results showed that positive feedback positively effected subjects' test scores relative to the control group and negative feedback negatively affected subjects' scores relative to the control group. However, the scale of the effect differed according to treatment; negative feedback had a more powerful influence on test scores than did positive feedback.
DISCUSSION
The discrepancy between the power of positive verses negative feedback to influence subjects' test scores warrants discussion. There is a stream of literature that has addressed the weights raters assign negative information verses positive information. It has shown that negative information is usually weighted more heavily than positive information, regardless of the context. More specifically, if an opinion leader conveys negative information about a product to someone, say a co-worker, almost no amount of praise from other opinion leaders regarding the same product can efface the damage done by the one negative comment. Sequence effects have been shown to be largely irrelevant, so whether the negative information comes before or after the praise has no bearing on how difficult it is to overcome the negative information's influence.
An argument could be made that something similar is going on here; there is just something about negativity that has a more powerful psychological influence on the receiver than positivity.
In any event, that positive feedback encourages learning and negative feedback discourages it has profound implications not only for pedagogy in general but for explaining (and potentially remedying) the apparent disparity between minority groups' test scores and the majority group's test scores. Whether a child's self-esteem is damaged by a parent, a teacher, or by society in general, the effect on his or her success in school and in life beyond academics depends, in a measurable way, on the extent of the damage.
