Descriptions of the measures used in this study: The 5-item Support for Student-Perception Surveys scale: The 5-item Support for Teacher-Perception Surveys scale: Note: For each item, the response options were scored on a 1-through-5 system where 1=Not at all and 5=Extremely. It can have a positive effect, too, if it leads to increased self-awareness that can help you . - One person approaches another and asks for a dollar to buy a bus ticket home. Subscribe now and start your journey towards a happier, healthier you. It offers one explanation for why people sometimes make an effort to adjust their. Forced compliance comes from pressure put on you to do something that. Cognitive Dissonance. This led Sweeney et al. To investigate this possibility, we regressed the Support for Student-Perception Surveys composite on teachers NNSTOY status. This form of group gaslighting leads to inauthentic, distant relationships. Sharma, Manoj Kumar. Permission will be required if your reuse is not covered by the terms of the License. Consequently, assessing the longevity of these effects seems like an especially important area for future research. Treatment teachers answered the same items, but did so after first responding to a parallel scale about teachers evaluating their administrators. More specifically, we find that treatment participants responses on the two scales covary (at both the item and scale levels). To reduce this dissonance, we are motivated to try to think that the task turned out well. discrimination: At times, surveys-as-interventions have been used with nefarious intentions, particularly in politics. Javascript is required for this site to function, please enable. We are committed to engaging with you and taking action based on your suggestions, complaints, and other feedback. From this perspective on cognitive dissonance, the negative affective state of dissonance is aroused not by all cognitive conflict but, specifically when cognitions with action implications conflict with each other making it difficult to act (Harmon-Jones et al., Citation2015, p. 185). of conflict, we have been developing a brief questionnaire to measure cognitive dissonance resulting from human-machine interactions. Stanford University Press. When the participants were asked to evaluate the experiment, the participants who were paid only $1 rated the tedious task as more fun and enjoyable than the participants who were paid $20 to lie. - Adrienne decides to go on vacation to Cambodia rather than Thailand, and once she arrives in Cambodia she thinks about how much better it is than Thailand. The 186 respondents completed a questionnaire concerned with smoking habits, knowledge of the effects of smoking, beliefs about smoking, and estimates of risk of lung cancer to themselves and to the average Australian smoker. Before dissonance theory came to the fore in social psychology, scholars in other fields utilised peoples desire for internal consistency to demonstrate biased responding in questionnaires. Smaller rewards not only cost less, but they can be much better at changing minds. questionnaire to measure cognitive dissonance resulting from human-machine interactions. In this instance, presumably the respondents felt awkward about maintaining a double-standard for Soviet and US reporters and thus shifted their opinions. Overall, to what extent is it a good idea to have teachers performance reviews be partially based on student input? Many experiments have since been conducted to illustrate cognitive dissonance in more ordinary contexts. Toward this end, we first re-ran our equation testing our core hypothesis without the NNSTOY covariate. Consultant A has 10 years of experience, whereas consultant B has 1 year of experience. Control teachers simply took a five-item survey scale assessing their feelings towards student-perception surveys as the initial part of their survey. Administrators often struggle in getting teachers to trust their schools evaluation practices a necessity if teachers are to learn from the feedback they receive. Hence, the purchasing decisions being shaped by consumers' dissonances arises because of the conflicts between beliefs, emotions, attitudes, tendencies etc. Saul Mcleod, Ph.D., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years experience of working in further and higher education. Have you ever felt like you might be exposed for not being capable at your job, thought you were a fraud in social situations, or felt like you were in over your head? 0000000636 00000 n
% In their laboratory experiment, they used 71 male students as participants to perform a series of dull tasks (such as turning pegs in a peg board for an hour). In response, districts experimented with new evaluation systems. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people are averse to inconsistencies within their own minds. In this view, inconsistent cognitions may serve as a cue for the presence of errors in ones belief system (Gawronski, Citation2012). It is a theory with very broad applications, showing that we aim for consistency between attitudes and behaviors and may not use very rational methods to achieve it. compliance: - agreeing to do things requested by others. For those in the treatment group (n=31), opinions remained consistent over this three-month span ( = 2.88, SD=.91; Mpost=2.90, SD=.92). Thus, while we are reticent to make a strong claim that the effects endured, we can produce no evidence that they faded either. Readers should have more faith in the findings corresponding to the pre-registered analysis and should treat the exploratory analysis as hypothesis generating. << /Length 5 0 R /Filter /FlateDecode >> These patterns and systems of thought are often subtle-it's difficult to recognize them when they are a regular feature of your day-to-day thoughts. For example, we take the fact that our two scales correlated moderately (r152=.52, p<.001) as evidence that they are measuring related concepts as expected (i.e. For all courses or just academic ones? n_1=16 & n_2=10 \\ Recent research suggests new approaches to assessing teacher quality in particular, students reporting their perceptions of their teachers may be a promising component of a teacher evaluation programme (Kane, McCaffrey, Miller, & Staiger, Citation2013). The situation becomes more intriguing when we shift to a case that has personal relevance (but no action implications) for survey respondents. This is where the cognitive dissonance theory takes part. While cognitive dissonance is often described as something widely and regularly experienced, efforts to capture it in studies dont always work, so it could be less common than has been assumed. If school administrators wish to nudge their teachers to be more open regarding student-perception surveys, they may want to consider whether teachers should have opportunities to evaluate administrators. about their environment and their personalities. Given the brief nature of the intervention, it would hardly have been surprising if the treatment effects had disappeared over time (Rogers & Frey, Citation2015). There is also some ambiguity (i.e., vagueness) about the term dissonance itself. 2 This most commonly occurs when our behaviors do not align with our attitudes - we believe one thing, but act against those beliefs. Furthermore, the control group showed much greater fluctuation in their opinions over these three months than their peers in the treatment group. Thus, there may be future possibilities for scholars to use surveys as interventions that might help facilitate desired educational outcomes. Risks Risks to participating are minimal. To the chagrin of many policy-makers, almost all teachers continue to receive proficient ratings despite principals reporting that the range of teacher competencies is more variable (Kraft & Gilmour, Citation2016). %%EOF
Thus, experimental evidence exists that is congruent with a cognitive dissonance explanation, even though no actions are implicated. Identify the following statements about ingroup favoritism as either true or false. We randomly assigned a group of teachers to respond to survey questions about their support for student-perception surveys under one of two contexts. Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). \end{array} Our intervention leveraged the social psychological principle of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, Citation1962). Because the content of the cognitions is not particularly relevant at a personal level, participants are unlikely to have held strong opinions about these reporters previously. - Humans developed more cognitive resources to deal with the many challenges that come from living in large groups. Many teachers and their unions oppose integrating student feedback into teacher evaluations (Cromidas, Citation2012; Decker, Citation2012). In other words, to say one thing and believe another would be inconsistent. postdecisional dissonance: While the discontent is unlikely to turn into glorious summer any time soon, new developments for districts aspiring to fairly evaluate their teachers offer some hope. Through a modest, dissonance-based intervention, we find that asking teachers about student-perception surveys in different ways can affect teachers receptivity to this evaluative practice. Which aspects of teaching might students reasonably report on? We argue that the construct of cognitive dissonance is very relevant to the clinical context and to medical education. Cognitive Dissonance: The unpleasant emotion that results from believing two contradictory things at the same time. Festinger, L. (1959). Personal Perspective: People who do or say something in conflict with their principles often just move the goal posts to avoid the pain of inconsistency. [Image] Retrieved from, Arcadia, has many categories starting from Literature to Science. vE Thus, those interested in improving teacher evaluations faced a tough choice. It is not possible to observe dissonance, as it is something a person feels internally. Because these explanations are speculative our data do not speak directly to either finding these results offer potential avenues for future study. We explored this assumption by regressing the Support for Student-Perception Surveys composite on the (average) grade-level that teachers taught. stream Furthermore, in actuality, validity is not an achieved state but an ongoing process (Gehlbach, Citation2015). We included NNSTOY as a covariate because we assumed that teachers who received such positive, public acclaim for their teaching would be more confident teachers and more open to feedback from students than their non-NNSTOY peers. (, Changing behavior beyond the here and now, The new educational accountability: understanding the landscape of teacher evaluation in the post-NCLB era, The effect of evaluation on teacher performance, Tennessee educator acceleration model: A Tennessee department of education website, AERA editorial policies regarding statistical significance testing: Three suggested reforms, A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students, Validation of student, principal and self-ratings in 360 feedback for teacher evaluation. The final analyses involved a follow-up survey that we conducted about three months after the initial survey. In terms of race/ethnicity, 85% of participants identified as white or Caucasian, 5% Latino, and less than 5% each for teachers who categorised themselves as African-American, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Middle Eastern, or Other.. 4 0 obj For instance, Harmon-Jones, Harmon-Jones, and Levy (Citation2015) describe three main paradigms of cognitive dissonance research, each of which implicate a persons behaviours: induced compliance, decision-making, and effort justification studies. Then, some participants were demanded to convince a reluctant person (in fact, secretly a confederate) to be a participant. How fair is it for teacher-perception surveys to be one of the sources in assessing the performance of school administrators? As you can imagine, participants attitudes toward this task were highly negative. However, our attempt to gauge persistence was not devoid of information. Among the examples he used to illustrate the theory were doomsday cult members and their explanations for why the world had not ended as they had anticipated. Second, these surveys are already happening across the United States and internationally, so school leaders need to get teachers bought-in to learning from student feedback. This study aims to address a research gap related to the outcomes of the use of technology when the performance falls short of initial expectations, and the coping mechanisms that users may deploy in such circumstances. False: Third, dissonance can occur when a strongly held expectation is disconfirmed. Which of the following factors would make two people more likely to develop attraction and friendship? Attitude Change and Cognitive Dissonance. Aronson, Fried, & Good, Citation2002; Walton & Cohen, Citation2011). Additionally, student surveys remain relatively cheap and easy to administer. Cognitive dissonance is a concept that outlines a specific feeling that is brought about by someone doing an action they do not agree with. People who feel it could realize, for example, that they need to update their beliefs to reflect the truth, or change their behavior to better match the person they want to be. This is referred to as spreading apart the alternatives., A person could convince themself that it is better to live for today than to save for tomorrow.. elementary, middle, or high school), =2.00, p=.37; or years of teaching experience, Mcontrol=18.43, SD=8.43 versus Mtreatment=17.37, SD=8.13, t277=1.07, p=.29. We applied this same psychological principle of cognitive dissonance to the challenge of cultivating teachers support for using student-perception surveys as a component of teacher evaluations. Loriann Oberlin MS, LCPC on November 15, 2022 in The Full Picture. Conflict, decision, and dissonance (Vol. Cognitive dissonance. During the holidays, relatives may use toxic positivity to project an image of the perfect family. For example, suppose you had to decide whether to accept a job in an absolutely beautiful area of the country or turn down the job so you could be near your friends and family. Men can be just as upset as women about sibling estrangement, but, for a variety of reasons, and they may not know how to talk about it. both are tapping into a general attitude towards feedback surveys). Cognitive Dissonance 2.) When one of the dissonant elements is a behavior, the individual can change or eliminate the behavior. After correlating the errors for items 2 and 5, a confirmatory factor analysis showed that the data fit a one-factor model (=5.36, p=.25; CFI=.993; RMSEA=.048). Providing individuals with feedback from surveys offers a related type of intervention that also may yield positive benefits for educational settings (Gehlbach et al., Citation2016). Only then could researchers fairly adjudicate whether student-perception surveys might work as a component of these evaluation systems. Cognitive dissonance was measured indirectly by asking participants about changes in their opinion about how enjoyable the task was following the experiment. Next, our manipulation was predicated on the assumption that teachers would feel competent to provide objective, fair and useful feedback to their administrators. Third, dissonance can occur when a strongly held expectation is disconfirmed. Our attempts to ascertain whether the effects of the intervention endured over time were somewhat frustrated. People do not necessarily experience discomfort in response to every apparent contradiction in their thoughts and beliefs.