Talking about success: Implications for achievement motivation

Abstract

Three studies investigated the influence of verbal descriptions concerning the performance of others on children's ability conceptions among 177 elementary school children ranging in age from 8 to 12 years. Study 1 showed that when high-performing characters were described with labels such as "math whiz," children tended to view the character's ability as more innate, and less susceptible to being altered by a change in effort. Study 2 showed that a reference to a successful character's previous struggles led participants to conceive of ability as more malleable, and to express more optimism about their own prospects for academic success. Study 3 provided further evidence that hearing descriptions of change in performance over time can influence children's reasoning. These results suggest that when individuals frequently make use of ability-related labels or describe people as maintaining stable patterns of performance over periods of time, they may implicitly convey maladaptive conceptions of ability to children.

Performance‐approach goals, task‐avoidant behaviour and conceptual knowledge as predictors of first graders’ school performance

“…Although performance-approach goal orientation did not exert negative effect on achievement outcomes in our study, the positive effect on children's selfreported avoidant behaviours suggests that teachers should be careful with encouraging peer comparison and competition in the primary classrooms. Since children are likely to become highly sensitive to cues that may help them to make sense of their own positive and negative outcomes at around the age of eight (Heyman, 2008), emphasis on peer comparison and competition is likely to distract them from task engagement and likely to be associated with anxiety, worry and other negative emotions in cases of failure.…”

Evidence for “Rose‐Colored Glasses”: An Examination of the Positivity Bias in Young Children’s Personality Judgments

“…Preschoolers' attributions of others are favorable and tend to overgeneralize positive impressions to irrelevant domains (e.g., assume that an intelligent child is athletic; Stipek & Daniels, 1990; see also Cain, Heyman, & Walker, 1997;Heyman et al, 2003;Saltz & Medow, 1971). Finally, research on children's willingness to accept self-report information from peers revealed that 6-and 7-year-olds were more likely than 10-and 11-year-olds to believe others' self-evaluative ratings (such as ''smart''), indicating a lack of awareness of self-presentation tactics (Heyman & Legare, 2005;see Mills & Keil, 2005, 2008, on the development of skepticism).…”

“…The development of a ''theory of personality'' is a prevalent topic of interest, in part because it has implications for children's psychosocial well-being, including peer relations (Dodge, 2006), achievement motivation (Heyman, 2008), and prejudice and stereotyping (Bigler & Liben, 2007). Theoretically, there is a need for cohesive models of personality understanding that place it in the context of cognitive and social development (see Malle, 2004).…”

Child categorization

“…For example, Gelman and Heyman [47] found that 5- and 8-year-old children were more likely to attribute stability to someone’s behavior if it was presented with a noun label (e.g., Rose is a carrot-eater ) as opposed to described in a predicate (e.g., Rose eats carrots whenever she can ). Heyman [48] demonstrated that this effect extends into children’s judgments of academic skill as well; when elementary-school-aged children heard a character described as a math whiz , for example, they attributed more stability and innateness to the character’s math ability than if they heard that the character did the best on a math test . Relatedly, Cimpian, Arce, Markman, and Dweck [49] investigated how different ways of describing talent affected younger children’s motivation to persevere in the face of failure.…”