Children’s Intuitive Theories of Academic Performance

Muradoglu, Melis; Cimpian, Andrei

doi:10.1111/cdev.13325

Cited by 28 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Even for a child who themselves believes that ability is malleable, praise for being "smart" (or other forms of person-focused praise) might communicate that their evaluator highly values successful performance rather than effort or learning. From this, the child may infer that, in the presence of that evaluator, they need to hide their failures and appear to effortlessly succeed; indeed, even young children recognize that people seem smarter when they succeed without effort (Muradoglu & Cimpian, 2019). In private, however, they might continue to work hard and take on challenges.…”

Section: Reputation and Praisementioning

confidence: 99%

“…As children pick up on these subtle cues, they might strive to attain feedback from others that makes them seem smart relative to their peers by strategically approaching or avoiding evaluators who tend to praise selectively . Inferences about their ability relative to others may even shape children's reputation management earlier in development; as early as age 5, children infer that an individual who expends little effort to achieve a successful outcome is smarter than someone who works hard to achieve the same outcome (Muradoglu & Cimpian, 2019). Additionally, by this age, children cheat more often in a game after overhearing an experimenter say that a classmate is smart (Zhao et al, 2019).…”

Section: What We Can Learn About Reputation From the Achievement Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

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Achieving a good impression: Reputation management and performance goals

Good

Shaw

2021

WIRES Cognitive Science

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Whether a student wants to improve their ability (i.e., has learning goals) or demonstrate it (i.e., has performance goals) plays an important role in their learning and motivation; students focused on the latter tend to avoid taking on challenges and seeking help when they need it. In the achievement literature, these different goals are thought to result primarily from holding different mindsets about whether one's ability is malleable or fixed. We argue, however, that this traditional framework has largely overlooked the powerful role that reputational concerns play in influencing which achievement goals students pursue. Specifically, reputational concerns may drive students to pursue performance goals and "prove" their ability to others, irrespective of their mindsets. We argue that closely investigating these concerns may help uncover new mechanisms by which performance goals are fostered and maintained as well as new strategies for developing interventions aimed at encouraging learning goals. Finally, we offer suggestions for how the achievement and reputation management literatures can be productively brought to bear on one another in future research.

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Section: Reputation and Praisementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: What We Can Learn About Reputation From the Achievement Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Achieving a good impression: Reputation management and performance goals

Good

Shaw

2021

WIRES Cognitive Science

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“…As an exploratory analysis inspired by Muradoglu and Cimpian (2020), the aforementioned logistic regression model was used to estimate predicted probabilities at 0.1-year increments. This analysis allowed us to approximate the age at which children's responses were significantly above chance.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Being versus appearing smart: Children’s developing intuitions about how reputational motives guide behavior

Good

Shaw

2021

Child Development

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Children engage in reputation management to appear favorably to others. The present studies explore when children use reputational motives to predict others’ behavior. Four‐ to 9‐year‐old children (N = 576; 53% female; approximately 60% White) heard stories about two kids: one who cares about being competent, and one who cares about appearing competent. Across five studies, with age, children predicted the reputationally motivated child would be more likely to lie to cover up failure (OR = 1.97) but less likely to seek help in public (vs. private; OR = 0.53) or downplay success (OR = 0.66). With age, children also liked this character less (OR = 0.56). Implications of these findings for children's reputation management and achievement motivation are discussed.

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“…Such computations are subserved by metacognitive insight into one’s performance and this could be a critical factor in deciding to engage in effortful tasks (Dunn & Risko, 2016). Indeed, younger children have been found to conflate effort exerted with their ability (Muradoglu & Cimpian, 2020; Nicholls, 1978), and metacognitive abilities have been reported to improve with age (Chevalier & Blaye, 2016; Shin et al, 2007). This could account for potential developmental changes in effort-related decision-making, particularly when these are made in the context of implicit tasks.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effort-related decision-making and its underlying processes during childhood.

Ganesan¹,

Steinbeis²

2021

Developmental Psychology

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Humans tend to avoid cognitive effort. Whereas evidence of this abounds in adults, little is known about its emergence and development in childhood. The few existing studies in children use different experimental paradigms and report contradictory developmental patterns. We examined effort-related decision-making in a sample of 79 five-to 11-year-olds using a parametric induction of cognitive effort and three paradigms that each involved decision-making between low-and high-effort options but varied in how explicit effort was made. This included a demand avoidance and an effort discounting paradigm. We also probed cognitive processes linked to effort-related decisions, including task performance, metacognitive accuracy, effort perception, and mental demand. We found that children of all ages were sensitive to parametric modulations of cognitive effort as indicated by self-report. In terms of effort-related decision-making we found that overall children demonstrated no implicit behavioral preference for low effort tasks, that older children stated a preference for low effort tasks, and that all children discounted effort. Further, implicit preference in the demand avoidance paradigm was linked to children's metacognitive insight into how well they could perform effortful tasks. These findings strongly suggest that although children are clearly sensitive to manipulations of cognitive effort, whether and when they use this information to guide their decisions to engage in effortful tasks depends strongly on the extent to which effortful features are made salient to them.

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Children’s Intuitive Theories of Academic Performance

Abstract: This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as

Cited by 28 publications

References 52 publications

Achieving a good impression: Reputation management and performance goals

Achieving a good impression: Reputation management and performance goals

Being versus appearing smart: Children’s developing intuitions about how reputational motives guide behavior

Effort-related decision-making and its underlying processes during childhood.

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