Investigating choice and its relation with performance, enjoyment, perceived task difficulty and predicted scores

Testing situations are often perceived to be negative by students and this affects their final performance on tests. One possible solution to make testing interesting could be by introducing choice during the testing scenario, as choice has shown to increase motivation and interest in learning. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the role of choice in testing. The study was conducted on 150 participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Mturk). Through random assignment, participants were assigned to one of the five order conditions: easy-hard, hard-easy, random, by block and by choice. Participants were asked to rate their subjective judgements on difficulty, enjoyment and prediction. A one-way ANOVA was conducted and it was found that performance had a significant effect on the order conditions (F=3.98, p < .05). A Games-Howell post hoc procedure indicated that participants in the random order condition did better than those in the easy-hard condition and the question order by block condition. Further, there was no significant effect of enjoyment, perceived task difficulty and predicted scores on the order conditions. In conclusion, the role of choice in testing was unclear and complex. Choice was perceived to be difficult instead of being easy. Studies in future can focus on this double-ended nature of choice.