Effects of an academic failure experience on subsequent performance on anagram and paired-associate tasks:...

Failure on an academic task was experimentally induced in second-, fifth, and eighth-grade school children. The failure experience significantly retarded subsequent performance on an anagram task and a paired-associates task by second graders but not by fifth and eighth graders. Among the eighth-grade boys, performance on the paired-associates task was actually facilitated by the failure experience. It is suggested that the older students' greater experience with negative feedback in school accounts for their resistance to its negative effects.