"Why Am I Working Hard?" Perceptions of Effort Source and Students' Self-Evaluations of Ability

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Students’ self-evaluations of ability are critical to their academic motivation. In the absence of explicit performance feedback such as test scores, students evaluate their abilities based on other information, such as effort level. Specifically, students can either perceive academic effort and ability as being inversely related (i.e., high effort reflects low ability) or positively related (i.e., high effort reflects high ability). Muenks, Miele, and Wigfield (2015) found that when individuals perceived another’s effort as being task-elicited (i.e., arising due to the subjective ease or difficulty of the task), they were more likely to endorse an inverse relation between effort and ability than when they perceived another’s effort as being self-initiated (i.e., arising due to the person’s own motivation to go beyond the basic demands of the task). In the present studies I extend Muenks et al. by investigating whether this effect also applies to students’ evaluations of their own abilities (and not just their evaluations of other students).

In Study 1, 210 undergraduates (67.8% female) read 12 hypothetical vignettes. For each, I asked participants to imagine that they were in a college-level mathematics class next to another student, and that the professor gave them a set of math problems to complete. I then gave them three pieces of information one at a time: effort level information (i.e., that they worked harder or less hard than the other student), effort source information (i.e., their own effort and the other student’s effort was driven by ease/difficulty or motivation/lack of motivation), and score information (i.e., that they received a lower or higher score than the other student). After receiving each piece of information, students evaluated their ability compared to the other student’s. Results indicated that participants in the task-elicited condition evaluated their own abilities higher when they exerted low effort, consistent with an inverse relation between effort and ability. Participants in the self-initiated condition evaluated their own abilities higher when they exerted high effort, consistent with a positive relation.

In Study 2, I told 160 undergraduate students (78.1% female) that they would be completing a mathematics task that another participant completed a few days ago. After completing the task, participants reported the level of their effort. I then asked them to respond to five open-ended questions about the task, intended to manipulate their perceptions of the source of their own effort (these varied depending on the effort source condition they were assigned to: task-elicited, self-initiated, or control). I then told participants either that the other participant who completed the task exerted less effort than they did (high effort condition), or more effort than they did (low effort condition). Participants evaluated their own ability compared to the other participant’s. Results indicated that in the task-elicited condition, participants’ ability evaluations in the low effort and high effort conditions did not differ, whereas in the control and self-initiated conditions, participants in the low effort group rated their abilities significantly higher than participants in the high effort groups, consistent with an inverse relation between effort and ability.

In these studies I extended Muenks et al. (2015) by providing additional evidence of the importance of perceived effort source to students’ perceptions of the relation between their own academic effort and ability. However, while findings from Study 1 were consistent with Muenks et al. (2015), findings from Study 2 were inconsistent. I will discuss these discrepancies. More broadly, in these studies I build on our understanding of how students’

Author

• Katherine Marie Muenks, University of Maryland