you still have grace, and mercy (from Grace, one of my favourite Chantal Kreviazuk songs)

One of the questions on my Testing final yesterday was to describe the method and results of a study by Bridgeman on examiner feedback. I read this paper pretty closely, so I'm fairly familiar with the method they used (the results baffle me a bit so I haven't absorbed them quite as well). What they did was test grade school kids on some random measure, in which the kids were told that it might not correspond to the grades they usually received in school, since it was un-related to their education thus far. They were given ample time to complete it so each child could feasibly believe they had done well on the test.

Two days later they re-tested the children. But when the kids opened their booklets to repeat the questionnaire, they were given some feedback. Regardless of their actual performance, some were told they had performed in the upper percentiles, with value judgments like "good work!" provided as well. Some were told they had performed well below average, with the word poor inserted somewhere. Some were told their tests had not been marked yet.

Now, the point of the second testing was to see if the feedback had any effect on their performance on the test as compared with their initial results. And you know, there was some effect on some groups, but I'm not going to get into that here.

McKelvie had included the following instruction in the question: "Include a personal comment about the study." Well, I thought that line was a little ambiguous, and I suppose I could have just asked him, but this was the LAST question I was completing on the exam, and I'd been sitting there for over two hours already and just wanted to GET OUT. So my personal comment was this:

What I'm wondering is how these children were de-briefed, because it doesn't address that in the paper, and well, it seems kinda mean to lie to children, especially with negative remarks. I just hope they all got to go out and play in the snow afterwards.

I wonder if I'll get any marks for that.  | ¶ 9:53 a.m.