Development Of Children's Ability-Judgments Under Different Conditions

Since Bandura addressed his theory of self-efficacy in 1970's, more and more educators valued perceived-efficacy as important factor influencing children's achievement-motivation, performance, and mental health. Studies have proved that children with high perceived-efficacy more likely chose challenging task, put more effort into the work, regulate themselves'behaviors better, and persist for long time, so they are more likely successful. Whereas children with low perceived-efficacy more likely chose easy task, put little effort into the work, and more likely give up from activities, so they often encounter failures and experience incompetent. According to Bandura, a person's experience of success or failure is one of important information sources for his self-efficacy's formation. For children, achievement–performance, and experience of success/failure are their important information sources for his self-efficacy's formation, and their ability-judgment in these activities are the basics for their self-efficacy. Recently, western psychologists primarily explored how children utilize social comparison or autonomous comparison information for ability-judgment, though several questions were needed to further explored. The present two studies explored kindergarten and elementary school children's ability-judgment under different comparison information, and how they are influenced by competition. In study Ⅰ, the developmental changes of 4-9-year-old children's ability-judgment under social comparison and autonomous comparison information were investigated by an experiment. In study Ⅱ, the development changes of 4-9-year-old children's ability-judgment under competitive and non-competitive circumstance were investigated by an experiment. The main findings from the above two studies are as follows: 1. When given social comparison information, all the children's performance-judgments were more negative after failure than after success; when given autonomous comparison, only 7, 9-year-old children's performance-judgments were influenced by failure.