It’s the start of a new academic year and a new group of students will start studying towards GCSE. After two years, they will take exams with important consequences: the results can allow them to continue their education or continue in certain careers.
Part of the job of teachers is to encourage their students to pay attention and participate fully in the lessons in order to achieve the best grades possible. They may stress to them how important it is GCSEs are for their future. For example, teachers may point out how good grades can lead to access to college courses, apprenticeships and the workplace.
And given the importance of GCSEs, teachers can also use messages which focus on the potential negative effects of failure. These include things like: “If you don’t work hard, you’ll fail your GCSEs and not get into college”.
We was investigated how students interpret these motivational strategies from their teachers and found that while failure warnings they are likely to encourage some students to work hard, it is not a message that should be delivered to the whole class.
Fear appeals
Messages from teachers that focus on failure are known as “fear appeals”: they can create an intense fear of failure in students. Teachers use fear appeals more often when they believe students will interpret the message as threatening and when they think their class is less committed. The intention may be to shock students into engaging in their studies.
Fear can be a powerful motivator. When a student believes that doing well on a test is important and it is optimistic for good, an appeal to fear – such as: “If you fail your GCSEs, you will struggle to get a good job” – can be a good thing. It can motivate students to work hard.
We describe this as a student interpreting the message as a challenge. One GCSE student we worked with (in research not yet published) said: “I don’t feel panicked about it at all and feel quite confident about maths… it motivates me to work harder and learn more about the subjects and thoroughly. “
Viorel Kurnosov/Shutterstock
But other students, who also see exam results as very important, might lack of trust that they will do well. For these students, fear appeals can trigger emotions worry and despair. They can they lose motivation, procrastination and worry. After all, their achievement is lower.
We describe this as a student interpreting the message as a threat. Like said the GCSE student: “Every time a teacher tells me that exams are coming up or if you fail you risk not getting a good job, I get so scared and sometimes I get so scared and stressed, I want to cry.”
Other students simply ignore the appeals of fear. These may not care for their exams, perhaps because they have already drifted away from their studies – or are so confident that they have no doubt that they will succeed.
Mixed messages
This suggests that using the same message to encourage an entire class or year group could be counterproductive. For students who feel confident in their abilities, fear appeals could be the right type of motivational message.
But as it is difficult for teachers judge accurately their students’ personal perceptions of themselves, it would be dangerous to advise the use of fear appeals on this basis. Students’ levels of belief in their abilities as well vary over timeand so appeals to fear might be appropriate at one time but not at another.
One option, of course, would be to change a fear appeal to a more positive message, such as, “If you work hard, you’ll get the grades you need for college.” But our research shows that students respond to messages like this with a similar way to fear appeals. Success-focused messages are still push messages.
One more useful approach it could be increasing the likelihood that students will interpret messages like this as a challenge rather than a threat. A way to do this is to give students a greater sense of control over their learning and exams. This can be done, for example, by helping students to think about the ways in which they learn the content required for the exam. Teacher feedback about the strategies students use in the classroom can increase their sense of control and understanding that they can improve their learning techniques.
