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Related Experiment Videos

Preschool children's reasoning about ability.

Gail D Heyman1, Caroline L Gee, Jessica W Giles

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla 92093-0109, USA. gheyman@ucsd.edu

Child Development
|April 23, 2003
PubMed
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Preschoolers judge ability based on task difficulty and effort. They link effort, niceness, and academic success, with these perceptions changing in later childhood.

Area of Science:

  • Child development
  • Cognitive psychology
  • Social cognition

Background:

  • Children's understanding of ability is crucial for social and academic judgments.
  • Early childhood reasoning about intelligence and effort is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how young children reason about ability.
  • To examine preschoolers' sensitivity to mental state information in ability judgments.
  • To explore perceived correlations between effort, social traits, and academic ability in children.

Main Methods:

  • 155 preschoolers (mean age 4 years, 10 months) participated in three studies.
  • Children made judgments about another child's ability based on task difficulty.
  • Recall tasks assessed perceived correlations between effort, social behavior, and academic ability.

Related Experiment Videos

  • A comparison group of 40 children (mean age 9 years, 10 months) was included.

    • Main Results:

    • Preschoolers judged children finding tasks easy as smarter.
    • Children perceived positive correlations between effort and academic success.
    • Children perceived positive correlations between niceness and academic ability.
    • These perceived correlations diminished in older children.

    Conclusions:

    • Preschoolers use mental state information and perceived effort-effort correlations to reason about ability.
    • Reasoning about ability shows developmental progression from early childhood to later childhood.
    • The influence of effort and social traits on perceived academic ability changes with age.