Student Perception of Social Comparison in Technology Enhanced Learning

Abstract

People often compare themselves to their peers in various contexts, including education. Usage of this general tendency becomes an effective strategy to enhance students’ motivation. Several successful implementations of social comparison in educational applications have demonstrated positive outcomes. Yet, they largely disregard the fact that people differ in how they react to social comparison, and how they process and interact with social information. In this study, we have built and evaluated a set of interface prototypes visualising different types of social comparison based on the directions and distance of comparison, as well as its privacy policy and social space. We found that not all students have similar social comparison preferences. On some questions, students in a low-performance scenario have provided significantly different answers compared to students at the top of the class. We also discovered that students with different achievement goal orientations can differ in their perception of social comparison. These results provide us with insights on how the effect of social comparison can vary depending on individual differences between students. This line of research can potentially lead to creating adaptive social comparison interfaces that support and motivate students in an individually-optimized manner.