External Feedback and the Effect on Adolescent Mentality

Overview

Violence in academic institutions has been notably increasing in the United States. School shootings and violence are at an all-time high, and so are suicide rates. The purpose of this experiment was to effectively answer the question: If high school students are exposed to neutral, negative, and positive feedback on their testing, what effect does that have on self-perception and worldview? Overall, it is shown to be that females are measuring at a lower self-esteem, and males are shown to be more confident. Teens are measured at a lower self-esteem than any other age bracket, and people with lower self-perceptions are more prone to violence toward themselves or others. The data in this project include the effect of each type of feedback on testing scores on adolescent self-perception and worldview. After participants complete the self-perception survey, they will examine inkblots. This was repeated for every participant three times after each test and results were measured over several days, with a significant amount of time spent on analysis and collection. Overall, my hypothesis was correct. Males did show a more negative worldview, but a more positive self-perception. Females were the opposite: showing a more positive outlook with a lower self-perception level. It is believed that this is because males are typically quicker to anger, and females are more critical of themselves. This lines up with the statistics: men are more prone to violence and women have higher critical behaviors for themselves. The results of this experiment have proven that if a student receives positive- or even neutral- feedback, they will react much more positively and be significantly less damaging to themselves or others.

Competition history

• ISEF 2023 Behavioral and Social Sciences · Entry BEHA008 · Dallas, Texas, United States

Resources

• ISEF abstract page ↗

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