How Receiving Help Affects Children’s Competence Beliefs and Task Motivation

• In Event: Who Knows What? Influences on and Consequences of Beliefs about Competence in Children

Abstract

Children receive a tremendous amount of help in their daily lives. This help can range from handing them objects they cannot reach to assisting them with homework and skill acquisition. Studies with adults and adolescents show that receiving help can have many positive consequences. For example, receiving help makes people succeed (e.g., Zimmerman, 2002) and also makes people feel valued (e.g., Grant & Gino, 2010). However, receiving help can also have the negative consequence of highlighting someone’s incompetence. As a result, receiving help can lower adults’ self-worth and self-perceived competence (Nadler, & Chernyak-Hai, 2014) and make adults afraid to ask for help (Kim, Zhang, & Park, 2018). Surprisingly, we know very little about how receiving help affects young children – even though the help that children receive is often foundational to their academic and social development.

In the current preregistered study (N = 128 5-to-7-year old children) we aimed to understand whether the receipt of help (vs. no help) influenced children’s self-perceived competence to perform a task as well their task motivation. We hypothesized that children who received help on a task would 1) work more slowly after receiving help, 2) think they did less well on the task, 3) like the task less and 4) perceive the task as more difficult compared to children who did not receive help.

To assess the effect of receiving help, we used a novel and somewhat challenging activity for 5-to-7-year old children which we called the ‘shape test’ (Cimpian et al., 2012; See Figure 1). In this test children drew circles inside a series of small empty shapes during a set time. All children first did a test without help. At the start of the second test the experimenter either provided help to children by drawing some circles for them or did not provide help; then, all children completed the rest of the test on their own. Afterwards, we asked children how well they thought they did on the second test, how much they liked the test, and how difficult they thought the test was. To assess task motivation, we coded how fast children worked on the second test compared to the first test.

Multivariate multiple regression showed that children who received help worked more slowly on the second test than children who did not receive help (p<.001; see Figure 2) and these children also indicated that the shape test was more difficult (p=.01). Receiving help or no help did not affect how much children enjoyed the shape-test or influence their self-perceived abilities.

This research thus shows that receiving help can have an adverse effect on task perception and motivation in children as young as 5 years of age. Receiving help might signal to young children that others think they are not competent and as a consequence decreases their motivation to work on that task. A second study is being conducted to further understand how receiving help influences children’s motivation and beliefs about competence.

Authors

• Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Jellie Sierksma, Utrecht University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Bailey Immel, University of California - Santa Barbara
  Non-Presenting Author