Master of Education

This exploratory study is an attempt to discover whether the self-efficacy judgments of primary six students can be altered by way of anchoring using social comparative information. Literature on achievement motivation has shown that students' achievement behavior is very much determined by how the students view themselves and their abilities. Students of different abilities have also been found to have different general control orientations regarding success and failure events.

In the present study, a math problem-solving task was designed to study students' task-specific efficacy under conditions of high, low and no anchor. Anchoring was achieved by giving bogus information about a hypothetical peer's performance on the math task. It was found that anchoring influenced students' self-efficacy judgments and persistence time. Low-ability students had a more external control orientation as well as lower self-efficacy judgments than high-ability students. Anchoring also affected high-ability students' persistence time to a greater extent than in low-ability students.