Low marks in exams resulting in low confidence?: What to think and do.

As we all know self-esteem or self-confidence is an important aspect in a person’s life. It contributes to both mental and physical health etc. Self-esteem as Rosenberg says is a person’s overall evaluation of him/herself. This evaluation maybe positive or negative.[i]

Although it is important to understand whether the person views him in a negative or positive light, the stability of this self-evaluation is an important aspect as well. The concept was first coined by William James in 1890, who first proposed the concept of contingent self-esteem:

“state self-esteem fluctuates around a person’s typical or trait-level self-esteem in response to positive or negative events in domains on which self-worth has been staked.”[ii]

Simply put fluctuations in self-esteem of a person influenced by specific positive and negative situations or events on which the person has based his/her self-esteem on, which has an impact on his global self-esteem as well.

This happens to people with high esteem as well (fragile high self-esteem). The catch here is, the weightage given by the person to the specific quality.

Contingent self-esteem in adolescents with regard to grades

Competence and achievement are intertwined with self-esteem iii. Self-esteem is dependent and formed upon standard expectations of significant others from us; their feedbacks to us. Why we are specifically talking about grades is because of the exceptional importance given to achieving good grades. For example: A child’s self-confidence may be dependent on his/her grades, because of the importance given to grades generally or importance given by parents and school etc. His grades increase, self-confidence also increases and vice versa.

Parents who give too much importance on achieving high grades will impact their child’s self-esteem iii. Based on the feedback and experiences that the child had with their parents with regard to grades; the child’s thought process goes- I am only good enough if I achieve good grades. So, to be good enough and I should get good grades. And they base their entire self on their grades, a number. Here are some TED talks about grades.

Focus on Learning, not Grades

Grades are important, but not Everything.

Importance and Implications

And talking about this is important because we have seen too many suicides committed by students because they couldn’t face their parents with low grades and because this instability in self-esteem is a risk factor for depression, anxiety etc. Also because, basing their self-esteem on grades had more costs than benefits for students.

Studies have showed how students whose self-esteem is contingent on grades showed drastic drops in self-esteem, positive affect when they got bad grades. Although, there was a boost to self-esteem when they got good grades, it was lesser when compared to the level of drop in self-esteem during bad grades. So, the boost did not moderate the drop in self-esteem in the event of bad grades. Bad grades indicate they are worthless. Academically contingent students are especially vigilant for failure. These students had low self-esteem and negative affect even on the usual days (baseline days). Instability in self-esteem also predicted depression iv.

In my experience as a school counsellor, exam anxiety is a very common concern among students. It usually arises from the importance and pressure the school and parents put on grades. Its so much pressure they are so demotivated from studying and lose interest in it and avoid it. It creates a vicious cycle, pressure leads to demotivation to study and sometimes avoidance which leads to low marks, which leads to more pressure. The same cycle repeats. It really disrupts their self-esteem, the relationship with their parents, teachers etc. It’s the problem with the education system as well; it emphasizes so much on marks, rather than learning. They study to score; they cheat to score. That’s why students can love learning but hate studying.

Blooms Taxonomy- the education system emphasizes on understanding and remembering, even byhearting. Where it should actually focus on applying, analyzing, creating etc. that’s half the reason why students feel its meaningless. So many students tell me, we don’t know why we are studying this, where do we use it etc., because they don’t show its applications, analysis.

Bloom's Taxonomy: Shows how analysis, evaluation and creation must be the focus of classroom activities instead of our focus on remembering.

How people cope with self-esteem threats

The internal workings of contingent self-esteem have cognitive, emotional and behavioral implications. Going by the Cognitive Behavior Therapy model, the cognitions and the cognitive evaluations that are formed about one’s self-worth leads to behavior patterns and emotions. The child whose self-esteem is staked in academic achievement continuously strives to achieve, for him it is “I must always get good grades, otherwise I am no good”. This concept of rigid musts and should that people hold and which lead to emotional and behavioral disturbance. These musts and should are rigid irrational beliefs that children might have learnt from their significant others (parents, peers and teachers etc.)[i].. It plays out in a child’s mind like this

“I must perform well always and win the approval of others otherwise I am no good”.

This must show the rigid belief that one must not make mistakes, one must always perform well. And this is not humanly possible because we are Fallible beings and we make mistakes all of us.

For students will high contingent self-esteem; based on marks, low achievement is a threat to self-esteem. When faced with this threat especially people with unstable high self-esteem (or contingent high self-esteem) use defensive processes like attributing the outcome to an external cause, minimizing the importance of the domain self-esteem is staked in; that is downplaying the extent to which self-esteem was based on the domain. All these defensive processes are used to protect and defend the self against negative views vi. For example: The examiner was very strict, paper was out of syllabus, I don’t care about my marks etc. They have a high self-esteem explicitly; but its fragile and internally they are insecure and have low self-esteem; and when its threatened when they performed poorly; they become defensive. They try to pursue and maintain positive self-view about himself and from others by continually trying to get good grades and when this is threatened, they become defensive.

For people with contingent low self-esteem; that is, they have low self-esteem and its especially contingent on marks. So, when they perform poorly their Negative Core Beliefs are reinforced. Negative core beliefs are beliefs that are formed about oneself early on in life; these may be dependent on Parent child relationship. For people with this contingency in self-esteem; these core beliefs may be something like- I am stupid (because he/she performed badly) or I am not good enough to achieve. And hence, their self-efficacy is reduced and they may cope with this through avoidance (Anyway I cant do it no point trying); showing disinterest in studies etc.

Dealing with Contingent Self-Esteem

1. Reduce Social Comparison:

Laura Berk in her book Child Development, says environments where social comparison is high or individuals who socially compare themselves usually show lower self-esteem even when academic achievement is high v. So, don’t compare yourselves to others; each one is their own person. It maybe with regard to your grades, your consistency in grades or any other aspect for that matter. Compare with the grades you got last time, its ok if it was higher than now, see where you can improve and try. Everybody makes mistakes even silly mistakes sometimes, learn from them and improve; because it’s not humanly possible to always perform equally. Its ok don’t beat yourself up over it.

2. Learning orientations: Niiya, Crocker and Bartmess (2015) refer to learning orientation as “the tendency to focus on what can be learned from experience, even failures[i]”. There are two orientations-

1. Mastery oriented attributions which is the incremental view of ability

2. Learned helplessness which is the entity view of ability v.

Having a mastery-oriented approach can act like a buffer against contingent self-esteem; because they hold an incremental view of ability that is; improvement is possible through putting more effort and learning from mistakes. They attribute failure to things that can be controlled like a difficult task or less effort and attribute success to their ability.

While on the other hand learned helplessness, orientations attribute their successes to chance, luck etc. This is because they hold the entity view of ability, where they think that whatever they do their competence will remain the same (low) because they generalize failure to their intelligence and their global self-worth vii. So, there is a sense of loss of control here and hence, anxiety and stress. “Whatever I do, I won’t be able to score, but I have to do it, it’s expected of me.”

With their attributions their goals differ as well. Mastery oriented attributions have learning goals- to increase their ability through putting in effort like seeking information or going to clarify doubts etc. A learned helplessness attribution has performance goals- performing well, outperforming other people and validating one’s ability or obtaining positive and avoiding negative evaluations of self. Learning goals were seen to be more effective than performance goals. Because people with learned helplessness rated their competence as low, the more they did not know effective learning strategies or study skills, the more they showed avoidance coping when faced with challenge, the more loss of control experienced led to their low performance and added to further strengthen their entity view of ability. A number does not define the whole you, your intelligence and how you will perform in the future.

Shows how learned helplessness maintains itself in a vicious cycle by leading to behaviors that ultimately feedback into the same entity view of self.

A viscous cycle of how learned helplessness- having self-critical view of themselves or seeing themselves as less competent maintains itself through other behaviors such as loss of control, low persistence, ultimately leading to low performance which feeds back to their entity view of self.

3. Self-affirmations- Self- affirmations are statements used to boost one’s self-worth by asserting their positive qualities. Like I am trying my level best, Its ok if things don’t happen perfectly etc. Self-affirmations are seen to act as a buffer against fluctuations in self-esteem when faced with a threatening situation such as a failure etc. Here are some self-affirmations for students dealing with this specific issue.

8 Self-Affirmations to increase confidence after low marks

· I am competent

· I will be able to do it if I put effort

· I am loved

· Its ok if I couldn’t perform well this time, I can improve and try again.

· I will learn from experience, mistakes and work on them.

· If I fall, I will get back up again.

· I am worthy of love no matter what.

· I am not my marks

4. Disputing dysfunctional cognitions, Thought record and REBT self-help form: These techniques are usually used in the CBT practice. As CBT says dysfunctional thoughts lead to our emotional and behavioral disturbances; so, in line with this the CBT therapist tries to change our dysfunctional thoughts into a more functional ones using the above-mentioned techniques. The therapist helps the client look at things differently, helps the client question his/her thoughts about him/herself seeing if they are true (if there is evidence for this thought), if they are helping and how they are affecting him/her etc. This disputing of the thoughts helps the client to see things from another perspective, reframe his/her existing beliefs and helps form more functional thoughts. The REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy) Self-Help form is one tool used for this disputation process;

Disclaimer: Should be used under the guidance of a Counsellor, after which it can be used as a Self-Help Tool.

The Thought Record is another helpful tool in CBT to help with the though disputation process. Counsellor and the Client works on thoughts together (collaborative exploration), writing them out (Ex: I am stupid because I failed my test); then both together sees the evidence for this thought and find the evidence against this thought. Then the Counsellor and the client together comes up with a more balanced thought- a thought that takes both the columns into consideration. Like Yes, I did bad in this test (from evidence for), but that doesn’t mean I am stupid (evidence against); if I try again, I can do better.

The child when his self-esteem is staked in performance and goes on to perform badly; he maybe beating himself down and looking at only negatives and only at the evidence for column and ignoring or belittling his positives and not looking at his evidence against column. So, this collaborative exploration can help his recognize his positives again and reframe his dysfunctional thoughts about himself leading to functional emotions and functional behavior.

The role of Parents:

Child rearing and relationship with primary caregivers (mother, father etc.) are one of the foundations that will determine how the child views himself and will view himself in the future. The interactions with caregivers will form the internal working model of the child; whether the child will feel worthy of love or not, worthy of care or not and whether he can master his environment or not will be influenced by how caring, responsive, supportive, loving the primary caregivers are. So, what you say to your child when he is growing up is very important. Parents of children who are insulting or disapproving will lead to the child having low self-esteem v and forming negative core beliefs about oneself. For example- Parents who are constantly insulting the child over his grades will lead to the negative core beliefs like- I am stupid. I am not loved or not worthy of love. Such conditional love will lead to a lot stress in the child, because the child is constantly trying to perform better and better for the approval from parents, to prove competence etc. Basing self-esteem on social approval and having a performance goal as we have seen earlier causes vicious cycles and fluctuations in self-esteem. And we have seen the implications of this fluctuations. Being loving, nice to your child right up until he/she is performing well and changing after is also destructive as well. And I have seen first-hand the effect this has on children.

What can parents do?

1. Communicate: Communicate to your child that he/she is loved, accepted and that you believe in his/her competence to do better. Tell them it’s ok, everybody has ups and downs and does mistakes. What is importance is that they learn from their mistakes and improve themselves through effort. Such warm and positive parenting can help the children know that they are accepted, worthwhile and competent v.

2. Understand: Sit down, talk to them, see where they are facing problems, why it’s happening, try and empathize with your child and understand from his/her perspective. Try to come up with a solution that might work, give information on how he can go about it. Remember, for your child this might be the first time he/she is going through something like this, they may not have enough experience to know how to cope and how to go about it.

3. Help: Help them out as to how to handle it, how to go about it, motivate them. How you react to your child’s performance is going to affect his learning orientation and attribution style. If you do the above your child might have a mastery oriented, incremental view of ability. If you insult, discourage, disapprove your child might have learned helplessness, entity view of ability.

References [i] Yu Niiya, Jennifer Crocker, and Elizabeth N. Bartmess (2004): From Vulnerability to Resilience: Learning Orientations Buffer Contingent Self-Esteem From Failure, PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 801-805. [i] Gerald Corey (2013): Theory and Practice of Counselling and Psychotherapy (9th edition), Cengage Learning India Pvt Ltd. [i] Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek (2016): INTRODUCTION TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-ESTEEM, Nova Science Publishers, Inc. [ii]Jennifer Crocker, Andrew Karpinski, Diane M. Quinn, Sara K. Chase (2003): When Grades Determine Self-Worth: Consequences of Contingent Self-Worth for Male and Female Engineering and Psychology Majors, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Pages 507–516