Conceptions of Ability

The way children reason about what it means to be "smart" has important implications for their approach to learning. When children think that people have little control over how smart they are, they often begin to avoid challenges, so they can avoid the risk of appearing incompetent. As a result, these children tend to miss out on important opportunities for learning.

Although many researchers have studied this topic in relation to older children, little is known about how children younger than elementary school age reason about what it means to be smart. We conducted a study to investigate these beliefs, among a group of 155 preschoolers, and a comparison group of 40 9- to 10-year-olds which was recently published in Child Development (Heyman, Gee, & Giles, 2003). We found that even preschoolers hold systematic beliefs about ability that affect the way they remember and reason about ability-related information. Specifically, we found that the children in both age groups thought that a hypothetical individual who finds a task to be easy must be smarter that one who finds the same task to be difficult. This finding suggests that even preschool children can reason about ability in a way that leads them to become concerned about their own level of competence, which may happen when a child has difficulty with a task that others claim is easy to do.

Our results suggest that preschoolers, and also older children to some extent, tend to assume that people who are successful must have worked hard. This finding came from children's attempts to recall a description of a hypothetical individual who succeeds at a task with almost no effort. When we asked the children to recall the information we had told them, they tended to incorrectly report that the hypothetical individual had exerted a lot of effort to achieve the successful outcome. Using a similar memory-test approach, we found that children in both age groups also tended to believe that individuals who are described as "nice" are also smart. Taken together, the results suggest that even before children reach school age, they have systematic beliefs about what it means to be smart that allow them to make sense of their performance on academic tasks, and help to direct their approach to school learning.