Influence Of Goal Specificity On Self-efficacy And Subsequent Performance In Different Forms Of Feedback

The relationships between goal-setting and behavior or psychology are always noticed in the field of Industrial or Management Psychology and Educational Psychology. Locke and other experts thought positively influence of goal-setting in the action of achieving duty is one of the most comprehensive achievement which can stand repeatedly study. At the same time, he noted that goal-setting has much more positive influence on the result of action, when the goal-setting is concrete and it is a objective and immediate feedback on the result of participants.Goal-setting is a process which can improve the effect and efficiency of action through concreting the results of individual, group, department and organization expect to achieve. According to the opinion of Locke , the reason of goal-setting is that goals might lead personal attention, inspire personal energy and can increase the extent of personal efforts and is helpful for individual to actively adopt and develop new methods. As one theory of inspiration, goals are one important inspiration instrument of organization, which always influence individuals' achievements. ThoughGoal-setting is complexly correlated with achievement, goals can make people compare present achievement with goals expecting to achieve so that they can keep their motivate level and improve their achievement level. Goal-setting is a process of building challengeable goals for individuals. Goals have two key characteristics, one is difficulty of goals, goals should be challengeable and can achieve, more easy or more difficult goals don't help to achieve them. The other is the specificity of goals, that is they must be clear and concrete, thus individuals can know what they want to do. Individuals who have no goals or their goals are unclear in work don't help to finish activity and improve achievement level. While self-efficacy will influence to some certain challengeable goals, when individuals' self-efficacy are higher, they will set higher goals and their achievementwill be higher.In the field of modern education and teaching, cultivating students' confidence and improving their self-efficacy is the importance of the school education. Then, how to improve students' self-efficacy and to boom their performance? According to the Model of Goal-setting and task performance, the effective method is to attach importance to the goal specificities and to lead students to set specific goals. In the teaching practice, performance feedback have two means: one is feedback the real performance to the students, that is the self-referenced feedback; the other is feedback others' performance to the students, that is the other-referenced feedback. It is necessary to explore the different effect of specific goals in two forms of feedback.Based on these opinions, the present study has examined the influence of goals specificity under two forms of performance feedback on the self-efficacy and performance.In this study, a scale was used to measure a sample of 278 students selected from a middle school by randomly sampling and selected 80 students who have the similar score of GSE. The present study used 2x2 between subjects factorial design. The subjects was randomly divided into four groups, each group was randomly accepted one of four treatments. All the data was processed with SPSS 10.0. The following conclusions were drawn from the research:(1) The goal specificity has no effect on subsequent performance, but has significant effect on self-efficacy, concretely improved self-efficacy.(2) The form of feedback has significant effect on self-efficacy and subsequent performance: the self-referenced feedback improves subjects' self-efficacy and subsequent performance; the other-referenced feedback decreases their self-efficacy and subsequent performance.(3) In the different form of feedback, other-referenced feedback make subjects blindly set higher goals which difficult to achieve; while self-referenced feedback make subjects set specific and challengeable goals which easy to...