Impact of teacher feedback on social working memory and associations with students' fear of evaluation in adolescents.

BACKGROUND

Social working memory (SWM) plays a vital role in cognitive processes and social interactions, and it develops rapidly during adolescence. The ability to learn from external feedback increases considerably during adolescence. Teacher feedback is one of the most important types of external feedback, however, its impact on the SWM, particularly in social emotional working memory, in adolescents and its relationship with fear of evaluation remains to be elucidated.

METHODS

To address these questions, this study employed a classic facial-emotional 1-back task to examine emotional working memory and recruited 144 adolescents aged 13-15 years which were randomly assigned to three groups that received positive, negative, or no teacher feedback during the 1-back task. Students' fear of evaluation was assessed by the Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale and the Fear of Positive Evaluation Scale respectively.

RESULTS

The results indicated that the accuracy of 1-back task was significantly increased in the negative teacher feedback group. Moreover, behavioral performance was positively correlated with the fear of negative evaluation scores in the group that received negative teacher feedback.

CONCLUSION

The findings from this study suggest that negatively informative teacher feedback during an ongoing demanding emotional working memory task enhances behavioral performance, which could be attributed to the fact that the fear of negative evaluation augments motivation and attention engagement in the task.