The Development Of Children's Belief About Intelligence And Its Relationship With Their Evaluation Of Peers' And Their Own Intelligence

Children's belief about intelligence, generally, refers to children's understanding of the uncontrollability of intelligence and it focuses on whether intelligence is stable and uncontrollable. This belief can be divided into two sets:The first one is entity belief, the other one is incremental belief.From the beginning of 80's, twenty century, many researchers in the west world have done a series of researches related to children's belief about intelligence and got remarkable achievement. After 2000, there were only a few researches who tried to explore children's belief about intelligence in China. And the limit of research tool led to the big differences in the results from the research of children's belief about intelligence. One of the most important questions was whether age difference or individual difference existed in children's belief about intelligence. In the meanwhile, we brought out more questions:What will influence the development of children's belief about intelligence? What kind of research method could help differentiate accuracy from standard of their evaluation of peers? How were their evaluation of peers and self-evaluation developed? What is the relationship between children's belief about intelligence and their evaluation of peers and their own intelligence? This dissertation included four studies:In study 1, based on all of the related questions and questionnaires in the previous studies, we focused on the core of children's belief about intelligence and interviewed 15 students in Grade 2. According to the results of the interview, we deleted some questions that were difficult to be understood or would lead to confusion and built a questionnaire of children's belief about intelligence. We only asked for children's agreement on entity belief about intelligence and all of the changes faced the same direction (positive direction).The result of this study showed the questionnaire we built had very high reliability and validity and could be applied to both children and adults.In the second study, we mainly focused on the question—"is there any age difference or individual difference existing in children's belief about intelligence"? So in study 2, we would explore the development of children's beliefs about intelligence and the relationship between peer relationship or parents'belief about intelligence and children's belief about intelligence. The result showed that there was significant gender difference in the development of children's belief about intelligence. Significant gender difference also existed in children's positive belief about intelligence, but for the negative belief about intelligence, only significant age difference was found. There were significant correlations between children's belief about intelligence and peer relationship or parents'belief about intelligence, even after we controlled age and gender.In the third study, signal detection theory was used to differentiate accuracy of children's evaluation of peers from standard of evaluation. We explored the development of children's evaluation of peers and the valence difference in children's evaluation of peers. In the meanwhile, we examined the relationship between children's belief about intelligence and their IQ. The result proved that age difference existed in the accuracy and standard of children's evaluation of peers and valence effect existed in the accuracy of their evaluation of peers. Moreover, we found that there was positive correlation between the accuracy or standard of children's evaluation of peers and IQ. Finally, Children with entity theory has higher standard than those with incremental theory when they evaluated peer's positive intelligence.In the fourth study, children were asked to finish evaluating their own and peers intelligence in the same questionnaire in order to eliminate distraction from standards provided. After this, we examined the development of children's self-evaluation and the relationship between the accuracy of evaluation and his or her IQ score and explored the relationship between children's belief about intelligence and the accuracy of their self-evaluation. Finally, we examined the conformity between the accuracy of their evaluation of peers and self-evaluation. The study found that significant age difference existed in the accuracy of children's self-evaluation. And children with different IQ scores would do self-evaluation differently. On positive belief of intelligence, children with incremental theory would do self-evaluation more accurately. Children who overestimated themselves finally got lower accuracy.