Effects of evaluation-subject and evaluationstandard on intrinsic motivation

The present study was designed to examine the effects of differences in the evaluation-subject and the evaluation-standard on intrinsic motivation. The subjects were 64 students. A × factorial design was used. Two conditions of the evaluation-subject (evaluation by the experimenter and self-evaluation) were crossed with two conditions of the evaluation-standard (norm-referenced and self-referenced). The dependent variables consisted of several measures of intrinsic motivation and anxiety obtained from behavioral indicators and questionnaires. One of the main results revealed that evaluation by the experimenter decreased intrinsic motivation but increased anxiety relative to self-evaluation. Another result also showed that norm-referenced evaluation decreased intrinsic motivation relative to self-referenced evaluation in one of the given behavioral indicators. But there were no significant differences between two conditions of the evaluation-standard on any other measures of intrinsic motivation. These results were discussed mainly in terms of cognitive evaluation theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985).