Effect of reported disadvantages on fear of failure in physical education

ABSTRACT

The present study examines, in the context of physical education (PE) classes, if having the opportunity to report disadvantages before performing a physical test could reduce students’ self-reported level of fear of failure. Forty-six students (31 males, M_age = 14.2 years and 15 females, M_age = 12.5 years) from a middle school and a high school in France participated in the study. A repeated measures design (intra-individual) was used, such that the fear of failure was measured before and after students were given (week 1) or not given (week 2) the opportunity to report disadvantages that could impair their future performance. The main results indicated that when students had the opportunity to report disadvantages, their self-reported level of fear of failure declined before performing the physical test. Conversely, when they had no opportunity to report disadvantages, their self-reported level of fear of failure increased. Implications for educational psychologists and teachers are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• self-esteem
• self-threat
• strategy
• self-protection
• school

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In mastery motivational climate, teachers favour mastery goals by emphasising learning, supporting effort and persistence, and encouraging cooperation and student reflections on their performance using self-referenced criteria. In performance motivational climate, teachers favour performance goals by emphasising social comparison and competition and use other-referenced criteria to discuss performance (for example, Ames, 1992; Ames & Archer, 1988).

2. In a pilot study aim at pretesting the material (n = 26 middle school students), the participants started the experience with the condition “no opportunity to SRD” and completed the condition “opportunity to SRD” in the first pass, which seemed illogical. Indeed, several of them highlighted that usually a test or an evaluation is more lenient during a first pass and less lenient on the second (and not the opposite). Therefore, to begin by a condition that gave the opportunity to SRD seemed to be the only order that really made sense for these students. For these reasons, the sessions with participants of the current study were not to randomised. Analyses conducted on this pilot sample did not show any effects of opportunity to SRD on FF when the sessions were in this order, F(1, 24) = .359, p = .55, η_p² = .014.

3. The effect size that qualifies the fluctuation of students’ FF scores could be qualified as “large” according to Cohen (1988) as they are higher than .14. A focus on the changes in the means of SRD scores, reveals that the effect of the SRD conditions (which reflects using SRD or the expectation of having or not having the possibility to use SRD) lead to changes in SRD ranging from .23 to 1.01 on a 9 points Likert Scale (ranging from −4 to +4) which represents between 1/3 of a standard deviation of SRD.