Experimental Evidence of Performance Feedback vs. Mastery Feedback on Students’ Academic Motivation

Work throughout the learning analytics community has examined associations between Learning Analytics Dashboard (LAD) features and a number of important student outcomes, including academic motivation and self-regulated learning strategies. While there are many potential implications of visualized academic information within a LAD on student outcomes, there remains an unanswered question: are there causal differences between showing performance information (e.g., comparing students’ progress to the class average) vs. mastery information (e.g., their individual score) on students’ motivation? Grounded in Achievement Goal Theory, this study answers this question experimentally by analyzing the difference between college students’ (n=445) reported achievement goal orientations as well as their motivated information seeking orientations after being presented with performance or mastery feedback. Results indicate that students in a performance condition which displayed ”above average” achievement on an academic measure reported lower performance-avoidance goals (e.g., not wanting to do worse than everyone else), and performance-avoidance information-seeking goals (e.g., not wanting to seek out information showing that one does worse than peers) when compared to students in the mastery control condition. This study contributes to our understanding of the motivational implications of academic feedback presented to students, and suggests that comparative information has direct effects on student motivation. Results thus uncover a potential tension between what might seem intuitive feedback to give students versus what might be more motivationally appropriate. The implications of this work point to the need to understand LADs not simply as feedback mechanisms, but as embedded features of a learning environment that influence how students engage with course content.