Children's overestimation of performance across age, task, and historical time: A<scp>meta‐analysis</scp>

Xia, Mengtian; Poorthuis, Astrid M. G.; Thomaes, Sander

doi:10.1111/cdev.14042

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 148 publications

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“…These changes have been found in tasks that assess children's memory (e.g., tasks in which children are asked to estimate the number of items they will remember [1][2][3] ), motor performance (e.g., tasks in which children are asked how far they can jump or throw a ball [4][5][6] ), visual search (e.g., tasks in which children are asked to predict how many hidden objects they can find 7 ) and probabilistic reasoning tasks (e.g., tasks in which children must estimate the probability of a desirable randomly determined outcome 8,9 ; see Figure 1). These studies show that young children overestimate task performance to a greater degree than older children 10 . For example, in terms of children's motor performance, 4-year-olds overpredict how far they will jump by ~40% while 6-year-olds over-predict how far they will jump by ~20% 6 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 63%

Returning to reality: Why optimism declines in childhood

Leonard,

Sommerville

2024

Preprint

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Optimism, hopefulness about the success of future endeavors, is widely heralded as a driver of individual and societal achievement. Yet decades of work in psychological science have revealed that optimism declines throughout early childhood. Why does optimism decline with age? In this article, we integrate insights from cognitive, computational, social, and neural perspectives to discuss three candidate mechanisms through which optimism declines with age: Learning from experience, changing theories of success and wishful thinking, and valenced learning biases shifting over time. We argue that declining optimism across childhood is best characterized by changes in children’s theories and valenced learning biases that can be sped up or slowed down by first-person and social experience across development. This novel framework suggests that optimism should be conceptualized not solely as an individual trait, but also as an adaptive bias that signals the nature of one’s environment. Based on this framework, we propose a definition of optimism that unifies research across disparate subfields and recommend future lines of inquiry.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 63%

Returning to reality: Why optimism declines in childhood

Leonard,

Sommerville

2024

Preprint

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“…These results indicate that during the period under observation, the participants’ mean calibration did not change significantly, with no signs of interindividual differences. Although a recent meta-analysis [ 50 ] found that children’s self-overestimation gradually decreased with age from early to late childhood, this finding was based on cross-sectional studies. In contrast, the present study’s longitudinal results show that for the age range considered here, overestimation remained relatively stable.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Longitudinal Study of the Development of Executive Function and Calibration Accuracy

Goudas,

Samara,

Kolovelonis

2024

Children

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This longitudinal study examined the development of executive function and calibration accuracy in preadolescents. This study’s sample consisted of 262 students (127 females) from grades 4 (n = 91), 5 (n = 89), and 6 (n = 82) who took measures of executive function and performance calibration in a sport task three times over 20 months. A latent growth-curve modeling analysis showed a significant relationship between the rates of change of executive function and calibration accuracy. The results also showed a dynamic interplay in the development of executive function and calibration accuracy. There were significant interindividual differences in the estimated population means both in executive function and calibration accuracy and in the rate of change of executive function, but not in the rate of change of calibration accuracy. The age of the participants had a positive effect only on the estimated population mean of executive function.

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“…These results imply that during the period of the study, students' mean calibration did not change significantly with no signs of inter-individual differences. Although a recent meta-analysis [46] indicated that children's self-overestimation gradually decreases with age, from early to late childhood, this was based on cross-sectional studies. On the contrary, the present longitudinal results show that for the specific age-range, overestimation remains relatively stable.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Longitudinal Study on the Development of Executive Function and Calibration

Goudas,

Samara,

Kolovelonis

2023

Preprint

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This longitudinal study aimed to examine the development of executive function and calibration accuracy in pre-adolescents. Two hundred sixty two students(127 females) from grades 4 (n = 91), 5 (n = 89) and 6 (n = 82) took measures of executive function and performance calibration in a sport task, three times within a period of 20 months. A latent growth curve modeling analysis showed a significant relation between the rates of change of executive function and calibration. Further, the results showed a dynamic interplay in the development of executive function and calibration. There were significant inter-individual differences in the estimated population means both in executive function and calibration and in the rate of change of executive function, but not in the rate of change for calibration. The age of the participants had a positive effect only on the estimated population mean of executive function. Overall, although the development of executive function and calibration in pre-adolescence presents a pattern of improvement, it is also characterized by large inter-intividual differences.

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Children's overestimation of performance across age, task, and historical time: Ameta‐analysis

Cited by 7 publications

References 148 publications

Returning to reality: Why optimism declines in childhood

Returning to reality: Why optimism declines in childhood

A Longitudinal Study of the Development of Executive Function and Calibration Accuracy

A Longitudinal Study on the Development of Executive Function and Calibration

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