Faster ≠ Smarter: Children with Higher Levels of Ability Take Longer to Give Incorrect Answers, Especially When the Task Matches Their Ability

Abstract

The stereotype that children who are more able solve tasks quicker than their less capable peers exists both in and outside education. The F > C phenomenon and the distance–difficulty hypothesis offer alternative explanations of the time needed to complete a task; the former by the response correctness and the latter by the relative difference between the difficulty of the task and the ability of the examinee. To test these alternative explanations, we extracted IRT-based ability estimates and task difficulties from a sample of 514 children, 53% girls, M(age) = 10.3 years; who answered 29 Piagetian balance beam tasks. We used the answer correctness and task difficulty as predictors in multilevel regression models when controlling for children’s ability levels. Our results challenge the ‘faster equals smarter’ stereotype. We show that ability levels predict the time needed to solve a task when the task is solved incorrectly, though only with moderately and highly difficult items. Moreover, children with higher ability levels take longer to answer items incorrectly, and tasks equal to children’s ability levels take more time than very easy or difficult tasks. We conclude that the relationship between ability, task difficulty, and answer correctness is complex, and warn education professionals against basing their professional judgment on students’ quickness.

Should Intelligence Tests Be Speeded or Unspeeded? A Brief Review of the Effects of Time Pressure on Response Processes and an Experimental Study with Raven’s Matrices

“…Critically, the emphasis on slow responding appears to depend on ability and difficulty ( Goldhammer et al 2014 ). Participants with a higher level of ability and/or motivation tend to modulate their RTs as a function of problem difficulty and spend much longer on difficult problems ( Perret and Dauvier 2018 ; Gonthier and Roulin 2020 ; see also Tancoš et al 2023 ), suggesting that these require substantially more time to be solved correctly. In line with this view, the relation between RTs and accuracy is negative for easy problems but becomes less negative ( Dodonova and Dodonov 2013 ) or even positive for more difficult problems ( Becker et al 2016 ; Goldhammer et al 2015 ).…”

“…Given the fact that high-ability participants tend to modulate their RTs to spend selectively more time on more difficult items ( Gonthier and Roulin 2020 ; Perret and Dauvier 2018 ; Tancoš et al 2023 ), all these possible differential effects might also be expected to interact with item difficulty: if time pressure affects high-ability participants to a larger extent, it may be even more true for the most difficult items. However, RT modulation in the face of difficulty is a relatively new topic in the literature, and this possibility has not been tested.…”