Exploring the Boundary Conditions of the Harmful Associations Between Academic Boredom, Performance, and Effort: A Meta-Analysis and a Primary Study

• In Event: 16.022 - Boredom at School: Antecedents, Outcomes, and Coping Strategies

Abstract

A set of projects was designed to explore the boundary conditions for the detrimental associations between academic boredom, performance, and effort. Although a negative relationship has been observed in cross-sectional (e.g., Pekrun et al., 2010) and longitudinal (e.g., Ahmed et al., 2013) research, several theoretical arguments suggest that boredom has potential benefits for motivation and learning through the redirection of attention to more meaningful activity (see Bench & Lench, 2013).
A comprehensive search of the literature was conducted to investigate how consistent the negative relationships between academic boredom, performance, and effort are and the factors that may explain variability in those relationships. Inclusion criteria for the meta-analysis required that a study assessed the relationship between state academic boredom and either performance or effort with a correlation coefficient, yielding 27 relevant studies with a total of 30 independent samples. The average weighted correlation between boredom and performance was r=-0.22, p<.001 and the average weighted correlation with effort was r=-0.43, p<.001. Both average effects were more heterogeneous than would be expected by sampling error alone (performance, Q(26)=167.4, p<.001; effort, Q(7)=171.6, p<.001). Seven theoretical and methodological moderators were tested, but only sample age moderated the effects under fixed-effect assumptions (performance Q(2)=7.61, p<0.05; effort, Q(2)=55.64, p<.001). Contrasts revealed that the negative relationship between boredom and performance was stronger for high school and college students (r=-.23) compared to younger students (r=-.18), but the negative relationship between boredom and effort was stronger for students in grades prior to college (r=-.45) compared to college students (r=-.26).
The research synthesis further revealed that the relationships between academic boredom, performance, and effort had not been explored for a situation in which a student has an opportunity to switch between unrelated tasks, despite theoretical claims that boredom functions to redirect attention toward more rewarding stimuli (e.g., Pekrun et al., 2010). Thus, a new study was conducted (university students, N=104, mean age 21.3 years, 36% female) to trace academic boredom, performance, and persistence while students completed a reading comprehension exercise and switched to a new set of interesting, unrelated, short word problems at their own volition. Boredom on the initial task significantly negatively predicted performance (β=-.26, p=.01) and persistence (β=-.23 , p<.05) on the subsequent task, controlling for initial task performance (β=.33, p=.004; β=-.09, p=.47), time spent on the initial task (β=-.13, p=.22; β=-.07, p=.57), and experiences of boredom on the subsequent task (β=-.25, p=.008; β=-.16 , p=.13). In addition, a statistically significant interaction emerged in which students who performed well on the initial reading comprehension task had a negative relationship between initial task boredom and subsequent task performance (β=-.31, p=.05) while students who initially performed more poorly (β=.13, p=.58) did not. These data suggest that the harmful effects of boredom may carry over to a subsequent task, especially for high performing students. Implications for educational practice and the self regulatory literature are discussed.

Authors

• Scott Stephen Trimble, The University of Texas - Austin

• Erika Alisha Patall, The University of Texas - Austin

• Rebecca Rose Steingut, The University of Texas - Austin