Social comparison processes and the social position within a school class already play a major role in performance evaluation as early as in elementary school. The influence of contrast and assimilation effects on self-evaluation of performance (i.e. academic self-concept) has been widely researched in observational studies under the labels big-fish-little-pond and basking-in-reflected-glory effect. The big-fish-little-pond effects suggests a negative association between average academic within a class and the corresponding academic self-concept of individual students, while the basking-in-relflected-glory effect expects a positive association (i.e. students are part of a high-performing group and therefore judge their own performance more positively). Because the big-fish-little-pond effects are expected to be larger in size, the net association between average classroom performance and individual self-concept is still expected to be negative. Both effects could be shown in various age groups from fifth grade until senior year (e.g. Köller, Schnabel, & Baumert, 2000; Nagengast & Marsh, 2011; Zeidner & Schleyer, 1999) as well as in various culturally diverse countries (e.g. Seaton, Marsh, & Craven, 2009; Wang, 2015). While big-fish-little-pond effects on academic self-concept have been extensively researched, similar contrast effects of performance could also be shown to influence other academically relevant variables, such as academic interest (Köller et al., 2000; Schurtz, Pfost, Nagengast, & Artelt, 2014; Trautwein, Lüdtke, Marsh, Köller, & Baumert, 2006). Interest is the motivational orientation of a person towards a specific object, domain, or area of knowledge (Schiefele, 1992) and can be described as domain-specific intrinsic motivation. Several researchers have shown a close association between academic self-concept and academic interest, as suggested by the Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985). Hence, there is a wide array of studies with a correlational approach showing both cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between academic self-concept and interest, as well as negative associations between average class performance and both academic interest and self-concept. There is, however, a lack of studies investigating the direct effect social comparative feedback has on academically relevant variables such as self-concept and interest. Therefore, this study sets out to examine the influence of similar contrast and assimilation effects in elementary school children in an experimental paradigm.

A sample of 230 elementary school students (122 female, 108 male) from 16 classes in four different schools participated in our study. Participants' age ranged from ten to thirteen years (M = 11.31, SD = 0.74). Consent was obtained from the schools, as well as from the students and their parents. In order to investigate the outlined research questions, participants were invited to work on a computer-based learning task called "The Flag Game". After participants were instructed about the upcoming tasks, an interest questionnaire was administered to assess pre-test interested. Then, the Flag Game was started. It consisted of two separate runs, each with a learning and a performance phase. During the learning phase participants were presented with 17 pairs of country outlines and the corresponding country flag from countries in the north (first run) or the south of Africa (second run). In the performance phase, one of the flags from the learning phase was then presented with five different country outlines (the target and four distractor countries). After finishing the first run, participants were presented with experimentally manipulated performance feedback about their first run performance. To test for contrast and assimilation effects, both the social position (high vs. low social position) and peer performance (high vs. low peer performance) were manipulated in a 2x2 design, resulting in a total of four experimental conditions. Following that, self-evaluation of performance was measured. Then, the second run was started. In the end, participants once again filled out an interest questionnaire to assess post-test interest.

Results support the assumption that both contrast and assimilation effects influence self-evaluation of performance as well as task interest. The clearest differences between feedback conditions could be shown in relation to self-evaluation of performance. Differences in feedback conditions explained around 40% of the variance in self-evaluation of performance showing both high social position and strong peer performance lead to a more positive self-evaluation of performance, with social position being a stronger predictor then peer performance. Effects of feedback conditions on task interest hint in the same direction but were less pronounced. Here, differences in feedback conditions could explain only 4% of the variance. These results show that the students most clearly benefitting from social comparative performance feedback are the ones who finish on top of their class, while those receiving feedback about a lower social position tend to lose interest and to evaluate their own performance more negatively. This could in turn lead to a further decline of academic achievement (Möller, Retelsdorf, Köller, & Marsh, 2011; Schiefele, 1992), especially for those students who persistently perform worse than their classmates. Hence, the use of social comparative feedback information might be detrimental to the development of interest for at least part of the students.

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