The Impact Of Feedback Valence On Reasoning:the Moderating Role Of Need For Cognition And Goal Orientation

In daily work learning,people always face performance evaluation.Leaders and educators inform learners or employees through feedback.But many studies only put forward the positive effect of positive feedback and the negative effect of negative feedback,and there were few studies to alleviate the negative effect of negative feedback.In fact,both positive and negative feedback can help learners understand the distance between current learning process and learning goal,especially negative feedback can enable learners to find the wrong direction immediately,so as to adjust to the right direction and achieve learning goals.In this study,we explored how cognitive demand,an individual trait,and the context of learning goal orientation can influence positive and negative feedback to guide individual behavior,and then learned how to alleviate the negative effects of negative feedback and maximize the positive effects of positive and negative feedback.This helps to advise educators and leaders to fully use feedback to motivate students and employees and improve performance.This study contained three experiments.Experiment 1 explored the effect of need for cognition and feedback on task performance,experiment 2 and experiment 3 explored the effect of need for cognition and goal-oriented on task performance.Among them,experiment2 and experiment 3 provided different methods to improve reasoning skills as guidance for inducing learning goal orientation.The method provided by experiment 2 is simple and does not require effort,and the method provided by experiment 3 are difficult to achieve it.384 college students were selected as subjects.Their need for cognition and reasoning performance were measured by Need for Cognition Scale and reasoning tasks.The data were processed by t test and ANOVA,and the following conclusions were drawn:(1)There were significant differences in reasoning achievement between participants with high and low need for cognition.Participants with high need for cognition were better than those with low need for cognition.(2)The reasoning performance of participants with high need for cognition were stable.There was no significant difference in reasoning performance after positive and negative feedback.(3)The method of improving ability induced the low cognitive demanders to have higher reasoning performance after negative feedback than those without induction.(4)Problem-solving methods can not induce the orientation of learning goals,and there was no significant difference between the individual who receives the induced content and the individual who does not receive it.