Toronto, April 1 (Inditop.com) There are a number of factors that influence how well we do in school, including the amount of time we study as well as our interest in a subject.
Now, according to new findings, how quickly we expect to receive our grades may also influence how we perform.
Psychological scientists Keri L. Kettle and Gerald Haubl of the University of Alberta in Canada wanted to investigate how the timing of expected feedback impacts individuals’ performance.
For this experiment, they recruited students enrolled in a class that required each student to give a four-minute oral presentation.
The presentations were rated by classmates on a scale from 0 (poor) to 10 (excellent), and the average of these ratings formed the presenter’s grade for that part of the course.
Students received an email one day, eight days or 15 days before their presentation and were invited to participate in this research study.
The results reveal a very interesting relationship between how soon the students expected to receive their grades and their performance.
Students who were told they would receive feedback quickly on their performance earned higher grades than students who expected feedback at a later time.
Furthermore, when students expected to receive their grades quickly, they predicted that their performance would be worse than students who were to receive feedback later, says an Alberta university statement.
These findings were published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
