The influence of task difficulty on engagement, performance and self-efficacy

My research examined the impact of a person’s belief about their own capabilities and how this influences their performance. In order to examine this I needed a task that was both relatively enjoyable, so that participants would engage with it in their own free time without pressure to do so, and a task that was not heavily linked to a particular subject as this would influence performance. That is the line of thinking that led to a PhD examining self-efficacy theory by getting hundreds of children to play Pacman, a popular arcade game