The Development of Children’s Understanding of Competence and Achievement

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Concepts of competence and achievement guide social interactions, evaluations, and academic outcomes. When do children acquire these concepts and how do they influence their judgments and behavior? Past work has not yet addressed how multiple and more abstract cues come together to facilitate these judgments, nor how understandings of competence and achievement interface with peer evaluations or academic behavior. In this symposium, we address these gaps in the literature while including a range of approaches involving racially and culturally diverse participants as well as speakers from different career stages and backgrounds.

Talk 1 finds that a basic concept of relative competence emerges earlier than previously thought, but that the ability to integrate multiple cues when inferring competence continues to develop after early childhood. Talk 2 focuses on talent and effort, two distinct determinants of competence. It documents the gradual emergence of “striver bias” (a preference for effortful over talented children) across development and cultures. Talk 3 shows that children gradually develop favorable evaluations for those who have overcome past constraints to achieve academic success, as well as for those whose performance has improved over time. Talk 4 reports longitudinal studies revealing that children’s beliefs about the malleability of intelligence undermine the negative effect of parents’ intrusive homework support on children’s academic performance. It offers new directions to turn these insights into practical educational interventions. Together, we reveal new complexities in children’s understanding of competence and achievement along with their relationships to academic outcomes.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Xin Yang, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• Young Children Infer Relative Competence Based on Efficiency of Process and Quality of Outcome - Presenting Author: Julia Anne Leonard, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Grace Bennett-Pierre, Temple University; Non-Presenting Author: Teresa Garcia, University of Maryland - College Park; Non-Presenting Author: Hyowon Gweon, Stanford University

• A Bias for Strivers: Developing Evaluations and Beliefs of Talented vs. Hardworking People Across Cultures - Presenting Author: Xin Yang, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Xin Alice Zhao, East China Normal University; Non-Presenting Author: Lin Bian, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University

• Children Consider Constraints and Past Performance in Their Intuitive Theories of Academic Achievement - Presenting Author: Xin Alice Zhao, East China Normal University; Non-Presenting Author: Xin Yang, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Yuhang Shu, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• Intrusive Parental Homework Support and Children’s Math Achievement: Relation to Children’s Theories of Intelligence - Non-Presenting Author: Daeun Park, Sungkyunkwan University; Non-Presenting Author: Elizabeth A Gunderson, Temple University; Non-Presenting Author: Erin Maloney, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Eli Tsukayama, University of Hawaii, West O’ahu; Non-Presenting Author: Sian L. Beilock, Barnard college; Presenting Author: Angela L. Duckworth, University of Pennsylvania; Non-Presenting Author: Susan Cohen Levine, University of Chicago