Attributional explanations in preschool teachers' competence judgments on tangram tasks: links with learning...

Teachers' competence judgments may influence children's educational experiences, yet the factors underlying these judgments and the attributional reasoning accompanying them remain insufficiently understood. This study examined how preschool teachers evaluate children's potential competence in tangram tasks and how these evaluations relate to children's learning behaviors.

A convergent parallel mixed-methods design was used with 195 children and 57 teachers in Türkiye.

As task complexity increased, the proportion of children evaluated as competent decreased significantly, and this shift was unidirectional: no child judged incapable in the simple task condition received a positive evaluation in the complex task condition. Teachers' perceptions of children's learning behaviors significantly predicted their competence judgments across task conditions, with attention/persistence emerging as the strongest predictor, followed by motivation, whereas learning attitude did not make a significant independent contribution. Qualitative findings, guided by Weiner's attribution framework, showed that teachers explained their judgments predominantly through internal child-related factors. Anticipated failure among children with lower teacher-rated learning behavior scores was commonly attributed to inattention, low effort, developmental immaturity, and limited cognitive ability, whereas anticipated success among children with higher teacher-rated scores was primarily explained through effort, persistence, and ability. Contextual and instructional factors were referenced infrequently across both task conditions and learning behavior groups.

These findings suggest that preschool teachers' competence judgments are closely associated with teachers' perceptions of children's learning behaviors and are accompanied by attributional explanations that emphasize child-level characteristics over contextual factors.