Poor peer work does not boost student confidence

Students' low confidence, particularly in numerical topics, is thought to be a barrier to keeping them engaged with education. We studied the effects on confidence of exposure to a peer's work of varying quality (very good or bad) and neatness (messy or neat). Previous research underpinned our hypothesis that a peer's bad‐quality work—which students rarely see—might boost student confidence more than very good work. We also predicted that a...