Poster #36 - The nature of ability concepts in early childhood

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Adults typically believe that one’s ability to do well on a task stems from two components: talent (or aptitude) and effort (i.e., ability = talent + effort). However, influential theories on the development of ability concepts suggest that young children lack this bipartite conception: These theories propose that before the age of 10 or 11, children tend to conflate ability with effort (i.e., ability = effort). The strongest evidence for this claim comes from a series of studies in which younger, but not older, children judged a character who worked intermittently on schoolwork to be less smart than one who worked really hard to earn the same grade (e.g., Nicholls, 1978; Nicholls & Miller, 1984). Because children were thought to have this immature, ability = effort, concept of ability, they were assumed to be invulnerable to many of the negative reactions to failure (e.g., decreased persistence) commonly seen in older children and adults.

However, research has since suggested that young children might be able to conceive of talent—e.g., they are sometimes demotivated by failure, which should be unlikely if they think that only effort matters (e.g., Cimpian et al., 2007; Kamins & Dweck, 1999). Why do young children sometimes behave as if they believe that talent/aptitude is a component of ability, but other times seem to equate ability with just effort? The present research sought to resolve this discrepancy by revisiting the paradigms from studies supporting the classic view.

We identify two methodological features of studies supporting the classic view that may have masked the sophistication of children’s concepts. First, in most of these prior studies, the first question always asked children to evaluate how hard each character worked. This could have created a task demand, prompting children to evaluate the character who worked hard more positively on subsequent questions (e.g., “Is one smarter?”). Second, although vignettes were intended to convey that one character needed less effort than the other to get the same grade, the intermittent working pattern of the former could have also signaled difficulties with schoolwork (and thus low ability).

To disambiguate this paradigm, we manipulated (1) whether children were first asked about the characters’ effort (as in the original studies) vs. about how difficult they found the test (i.e., question order), and (2) whether the character who put in less effort was shown to have worked intermittently (as in the original studies) vs. quickly (i.e., vignette type). We hypothesized that these changes would result in more “mature,” ability = talent + effort responses.

As predicted, methodological ambiguities—not conceptual deficiencies—seem to be the source of children’s “immature” responses in the classic studies. Results from two studies with 288 4- to 9-year-olds suggested that, when these two misleading aspects of the stimuli were clarified, children’s responses revealed a bipartite understanding of ability (see Figure 1). That is, even young children considered both effort and talent/aptitude when judging the characters’ abilities. Thus, young children’s concepts of ability are not as different from adults’ as previously theorized.

Authors

• Melis Muradoglu, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Andrei Cimpian, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author