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6- and 8-year-olds’ performance evaluations: Do they differ between self and unknown others?

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Abstract

The current study investigated kindergarteners and second graders’ ability to monitor and evaluate their own and a virtual peer’s performance in a paired-associate learning task. Participants provided confidence judgments (CJs) for their own responses and performance-based judgments (judgments provided after receiving feedback on their performance) for both their own and a virtual peer’s responses. For the performance-based judgments, children were confronted with their own or the peer’s answer as well as the correct answer. Additionally, participants were asked to credit their own and the peer’s correct and incorrect answers while facing feedback. Results indicate an age-related progression in metacognitive monitoring skills, with second graders differentiating more strongly in their confidence judgments between correct and incorrect responses compared to kindergarteners. Regarding performance-based judgments, children of both age groups provided higher judgments for correctly compared to incorrectly recognized items as well as for their own responses in comparison to the responses of the unknown child. Similarly, when crediting, participants of both age groups gave more credits for correct recognition than for incorrect recognition and for their own responses than for the peer’s responses. The significant interaction between age group and recognition accuracy for the crediting shows that second graders gave more credits for correctly recognized items while kindergarteners gave more credits for incorrect answers than the older children – primarily for their own incorrect answers. In conclusion, the study provides new insights into 6- and 8-year-olds’ evaluations of their own and an unknown child’s performance in a paired-associate learning task by showing that children of both age groups generally judged and credited responses in their own favor. These results add to our understanding of biases in children’s performance evaluations, including metacognitive judgments and judgments provided after receiving feedback.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participating children and their families, the children’s teachers and the student research assistants who helped with data collection. Many thanks also to Jakob Raible for his valuable help in task design and programming.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Developmental Psychology and Center for Cognition, Learning & Memory, University of Bern, Hochschulzentrum vonRoll, Fabrikstrasse 8, 3012, Bern, Switzerland

    Nesrin Destan, Manuela A. Spiess, Mariëtte van Loon & Claudia M. Roebers

  2. School of Health Professions Education (SHE), Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, P. O. Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Anique de Bruin & Mariëtte van Loon

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  1. Nesrin Destan
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  2. Manuela A. Spiess
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Correspondence to Nesrin Destan.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Conflict of interest

This project was partially financed by a grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF- Grant No.100014_126559 provided to the author Claudia M. Roebers. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Destan, N., Spiess, M.A., de Bruin, A. et al. 6- and 8-year-olds’ performance evaluations: Do they differ between self and unknown others?. Metacognition Learning 12, 315–336 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-017-9170-5

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