Enhancing and Undermining Intrinsic Motivation: The Effects of Task-Involving and Ego-Involving Evaluation on Interest and Performance

Ruth Butler is an educational psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she has worked on achievement motivation and the development of self-appraisal across a long career and is now Professor Emeritus. Her research through the 1980s, some of it with Mordecai Nisan, built a consistent finding: the kind of evaluation a student receives shapes whether they stay interested in a task, and feedback that turns attention toward the work itself behaves differently from feedback that turns attention toward the self and one's standing against others. Her 1986 study with Nisan and her 1987 paper on the task-involving and ego-involving properties of evaluation are the immediate predecessors of this article, which is the most cited of the sequence.

The study appeared in 1988 in the British Journal of Educational Psychology, volume 58, part 1 — a peer-reviewed journal of the British Psychological Society. It reports an experiment Butler ran with Israeli schoolchildren: twelve classes of fifth and sixth graders were randomly assigned to one of three feedback conditions, and after they worked on tasks chosen to be interesting they received either individual written comments, numerical grades, or grades with comments attached. Interest and performance were measured for 132 selected pupils, of high and of low prior school achievement, at three points — before the manipulation, during it, and at a later session when no further evaluation was expected. The peer-review filter and the random assignment are the marks of a designed experimental study rather than a classroom observation.

The result is the reason the paper is cited. Comments alone produced the highest interest and the highest performance, at both achievement levels, and held up even when pupils did not expect further feedback. Grades, and grades with comments attached, behaved alike and generally depressed both interest and performance — adding a grade to a comment did not preserve the comment's benefit but pulled the response toward the grades-only pattern. Because students in the grades-plus-comments condition attended to the grade, the comment beside it did little work. That makes this a primary empirical source for a claim that recurs through the assessment literature: a grade printed next to feedback can blunt the feedback.

The article sits at the empirical base of this set rather than synthesising it. The feedback synthesis in The Power of Feedback and the classroom-assessment pamphlet by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam Inside the Black Box both draw on Butler's experiments for the finding that ego-directed evaluation can undermine the task; it is also a frequent citation in arguments against conventional grading, including Alfie Kohn's The Case Against Grades, a polemic for abolishing grades, and Susan Blum's edited volume Ungrading. Butler's stake here is the ordinary reputational and professional interest of an academic testing and confirming a hypothesis; she sold no programme and gave no blanket grades-versus-comments prescription, and later commentators have noted that the study's design — a small set of tasks, one short manipulation, schoolchildren rather than older students — is narrower than the broad anti-grading conclusions sometimes hung on it.