Scotland captain Kelly Brown is convinced his side has made progress during the six nations campaign, but knows they must learn quickly from their late collapse against France.
Scotland have no chance of equalling their third-place finish from last year ahead of their final game in Wales on Saturday, although they could match their four-point tally.
However, Scott Johnson’s men would need to win by 20 points in Cardiff to avoid their seventh bottom-two finish in eight years.
Johnson has been aiming to make Scotland more competitive before handing over to Vern Cotter at the end of the season, when the current Clermont Auvergne coach steps up and attempts to prepare the squad for the 2015 World Cup.
Scotland suffered heavy defeats to Ireland and England in their opening two games, scoring just six points in the process, but have been competitive against Italy and France.
However, a late and narrow win in Rome was followed by a very similar defeat against France at Murrayfield.
Brown, pictured below, said: “If you look at the stats and the performances over the course of the six nations, I feel we have definitely improved.
“But we know we need to keep on with the improving, because while we are improving, so are all the other nations. We need to keep on working hard and pushing the bar higher and higher.
“We certainly take a lot of confidence from the last two performances but we didn’t win on Saturday.”
Scotland were heading for victory following first-half tries from Stuart Hogg and Tommy Seymour but a misplaced pass from Duncan Weir let in Yoann Huget to score against the run of play, and the French stole a 19-17 win thanks to Jean-Marc Doussain’s late penalty after Tim Swinson was controversially penalised for failing to release at the breakdown.
Brown said: “Over the course of the game we showed a lot of good stuff. Our set-piece was pretty good. Our defence was very good, apart from the interception I didn’t feel the French really looked like scoring. Our attack was pretty good as well.
“So we will certainly take a lot of confidence from that and couple that with the lessons we need to learn, and that will leave us in a good place.
“There are two things. The first is closing the game out. I feel we did all the hard work and had the game won, and then couldn’t quite finish it off. The second is, we need to improve our discipline because we conceded a huge number of penalties. That’s something we have looked at very closely and something we need to improve.
“We need to learn, but I feel as a side we are doing that, and we go down to Wales full of optimism. They are a very tough side, but we can be a challenge for anyone.”