Research School Network: Relative Performance Feedback: unnecessarily cruel or a useful tool? In the corporate world relative performance is a common place, however it remains a contentious issue in schools.

Imagine you are a racing driver and you are completing some practice laps ready for qualifying or the race – you have just completed your first practice lap and your team come over the radio to congratulate you on a ​“solid” lap. At first this assessment and feedback of your lap may seem useful – it would suggest your have done a decent job, but could you imagine a racing team like Mercedes leaving the feedback at just ​“solid”? Of course, you can’t – because this simply wouldn’t suffice. Solid or any other term that could be used is just fuzzy and vague. What does it actually mean? How does it compare to other laps you have done? How does it compare to your competitors? How could it be improved? ​“Solid” does not help you answer any of these questions.

This is why any racing team worth their salt will pour over as much data as they can, looking at lap and split times, corner entry and exit speeds etc., but even such data would be pretty useless without any comparison to their competitors. Whether it is entire lap time or sector time comparison to the best driver or your closest competitor through that section allows for you to work out where you are in the pecking order and where you need to improve if you want to succeed.

Whether it is the sporting arena, the work place, school or just society in general the research is pretty conclusive that we, humans, are pretty last place adverse. Being given feedback on and therefore knowing how our peers are doing (often termed as relative performance feedback) has been shown to improve effort and performance in both the workplace and educational settings, by strongly influencing individual perceptions, choices and behavior. And yet in the vast majority of educational settings assessment structure and the way we as educators disseminate this to students actively seeks to avoid this relative performance feedback, instead commonly leaning towards vague levels/​thresholds being given to students and home. This is not to say all schools do this with a number of schools having adopted a rank order assessment system amongst many other approaches. Nor is this to say that relative performance feedback is not without its own drawbacks, but there is a growing body of work looking into the potential impacts of relative performance feedback in schools of which two commonly referred to pieces are discussed here.

The Importance of Relative Performance Feedback Information: Evidence from a natural experiment using high school student – Ghazala Azmat and Nagore Iriberri, 2010.

In this study students in a school in northern Spain were provided with relative performance feedback in their four reports over the academic year. Students received info on their own score in assessments for all subjects versus the class average, allowing for social comparisons in regards to being above/​below and how far from the class average. Interestingly there was no explicit reward or consequence for being above or below the average, and yet the study found that over the year the provision of relative performance feedback had a strong positive impact on outcomes, resulting in a 5% increase in average grades. In addition, the positive effect was significant throughout the grade distribution, suggesting that it did not disadvantage the lower achieving students which is often a concern of many when contemplating providing relative performance feedback.

The authors hypothesized that students may have reacted to the additional information because we are inherently competitive or because it improves our own understanding of our ability (which is usually imperfect) therefore influencing our efforts. The study found that the impacts of relative performance feedback were stronger in the first and final year, suggesting new students were most responsive to it and the significance of their final exams also provoke a reaction.

Following the removal of relative performance feedback at the end of the academic year the positive impacts disappeared. It is important to note that the relative feedback was removed due to teacher and parent complaints that it fostered too much competition and could cause stress for some students.

Motivating low-achievers: Relative Performance Feedback in primary school – Henning Hermes, Martin Huschens, Franz Rothlauf and Daniel Schunk, 2021

The introduction to this study mirrors much of what is said in the former, outlining the advantages of relative performance feedback in improving motivation, effort and performance in both corporate and educational settings, but also noting the concerns regarding the potentially negative impacts on low achieving student – which could exaggerate inequalities.

In the study 400 children across 7 German primary school took part in a 15-hour mathematics e‑learning course. The experimental group were provided with individual and relative performance feedback, while the control group only received individual feedback. The treatment group data was constantly visible and updated during the school day, with points being awarded based on performance improvements over time – the higher the improvement the more points the child could earn. Performance was measured by the time taken to complete similar tasks at set points over the learning, with time penalties included for incorrect answers to prevent student guessing to increase their speed.

Results of the study suggest that relative performance feedback had a positive impact on student performance and effort. Despite it often being cited that relative feedback could be demoralizing for low starting point students, the results suggest this is not always the case, with low starting point students showing improved motivation, effort and performance on their maths tasks. The design of this study which rewarded improvement may be the cause of this. However, perhaps important to consider, is that child questionnaires completed by the students indicated that low starting point students perceive the relative performance feedback to be more stressful.

Like all assessment and feedback system relative performance feedback will have its limitations, drawbacks and critics. While there is perhaps a need for further research into its role in educational settings over a longer period of study (the studies listed above are only short term), the findings of the two studies listed and other pieces of work definitely suggest it is worth considering incorporating into any assessment systems we use in schools. 

This blog is only a superficial dive into the discussion around cohort referenced assessment – if you wish to read more I would highly recommend Professor Becky Allen’s series of blogs on the ​“grading game”.

Ben Crockett (@BenCrockett1).