Study On The Factors That Influence Preschooler's Ability Evaluation

The development of preschoolers' knowledge about their own or others' abilities is one of the key aspects of early metacognitive development. How preschoolers evaluate their own abilities will greatly influence their select of tasks and activites, the amount of time and effort they expend on those activities and their expectations to success. Furthermore, preschoolers' self-evaluation of ability has important effect on the development of their self-concept,achievement motivation,personality and so on.This study investigated the developmental trend of preschoolers' evaluation toward their own and others' abilities and the factors that influenced their evaluation as well as the complicated interaction among these factors in 62 preschoolers between 3 and 6 who were all native Chinese from a kindergarten in Shanghai. Subjects participated in two tasks, that was, psychomotor task and memory task during which they had to make prediction about their own or other children' performance under different situations. In addition, subjects were interviewed about their reasons to predict.The results demonstrated that the accuracy of preschoolers' prediction toward their own or others' performance increased with age in both psychomotor task and memory task. Preschoolers' ability evaluation about themselves or others was mediated by a lot of factors among which there was complicated and dynamic interaction. These factors included the nature of task, experience, theory of mind, wish and so on. As a result, preschoolers' true level of meta-ability may not be displayed in their performance prediction.Through this study we achieve a better understanding of the developmental trend of preschoolers' ability evaluation toward themselves or others, the factors that influence ability evaluation as well as the complicated interaction among these factors. In the future study, there are more jobs to do in method designing ,task choosing and experimental controlling so as to better reveal the developmental truth of children' ability evaluation across different domains.