Significance of early beliefs about ability
Keywords: beliefs about ability, parents, growth mindset, judgment accuracy, cognitive ability
Today, we’re looking at two different studies examining the effect of beliefs about ability. First, Muradoglu et al. (2025) published “The Structure and Motivational Significance of Early Beliefs about Ability” in Developmental Psychology. Here are the edited abstract and impact statements:
Adults hold a broad range of beliefs about intellectual ability. Key examples include beliefs about its malleability, its distribution in the population, whether high levels of it (“brilliance”) are necessary for success, its origins, and its responsiveness to intervention. Here, we examined the structure and motivational significance of this network of consequential beliefs in a sample of elementary school-age children (5- to 11-year-olds, N = 231; 116 girls, 112 boys, three gender nonbinary children; predominantly White and Asian children from relatively high-income backgrounds). We assessed five beliefs: (a) growth mindsets (malleability), (b) universal mindsets (distribution), (c) brilliance beliefs (necessity for success), and beliefs about ability’s (d) innateness and (e) responsiveness to intervention. Even among the youngest children, these beliefs were empirically distinguishable and also largely coherent, in that they related to each other in expected ways. Moreover, the five beliefs assessed here were differentially related to children’s learning (vs. performance) goals, preference for challenging tasks, and evaluative concern (i.e., concern that mistakes will lead others to evaluate the self negatively). Even when adjusting for age, children with growth mindsets were oriented toward learning goals and preferred challenging tasks; children who believed ability has innate origins preferred performance goals; and younger (but not older) children who thought success required brilliance expressed more concern over being evaluated. These findings speak to the multifaceted nature of children’s concepts of ability and highlight their significance for children’s achievement-related attitudes and behavior in the early school years.
The findings from this study suggest that 5- to 11-year-old children’s beliefs about the nature of intellectual ability—namely, its malleability, universality, importance for success, origins, and responsiveness to intervention—are distinct and coherently interrelated. Moreover, a number of these beliefs relate to children’s learning (vs. performance) goals, preference for challenges, and concern about others negatively judging their abilities. Together, these findings point to sophistication in early beliefs about ability and highlight the importance of these beliefs for young children’s motivation.
Unsurprisingly, Dweck is one coauthor of this study. I liked several things about this study. First, I like the idea that we can ask kids about various facets of intellectual ability. I love the finding that, when children believe intelligence is malleable, they focus on learning goals and take on more challenging tasks. We also see the negative impact of believing that intellectual ability is fixed in that these children focus more on performance goals. It’s also sad that young children focused on brilliance are more concerned about being evaluated. The next study uses a very different approach but has impacts as well. Mack, Scherrer & Preckel (2024) published “How Smart is My Child? The judgment accuracy of parents regarding their children's cognitive ability” in Child Development. Here are highly edited excerpts:
Parents' judgment of their children's cognitive ability is important for providing adequate learning environments. This study examined parents' judgment accuracy with 2346 children (M = 8.94 years; 48.3% girls) and their parents (1283 mothers, 426 fathers, and 637 parental pairs). The data were collected between September 2012 and February 2014 in Germany. Latent regression analyses were conducted for the overall sample and by grade (nGrade1&2 = 830; nGrade3&4 = 1516). Characteristics of the child (gender, birth order) and parents (gender, socioeconomic background) were investigated as moderators. Children's cognitive ability explained 34%/25%/37% (overall sample/ Grade 1&2/ Grade3&4) of the variance in parental judgments. Judgments depended more on children's academic achievement than on cognitive ability. Parents judged their son's intelligence more accurately than their daughter's and first-born children more accurately than last-born children. Higher-educated parents showed higher judgment accuracy.
For most children, the family is the primary educational environment that lays the foundation for their development (Landry et al., 2006). This includes children's cognitive ability, which can be defined as a general mental capability involving reasoning, planning, problem-solving, abstract thinking, complex idea comprehension, and learning from experience (Gottfredson, 1997). Parents strongly contribute to the development of children's cognitive ability by providing stimulating play materials, offering opportunities for active learning, being responsive and sensitive to their children's questions, and promoting their self-confidence and interest in learning. Parents can better support their children's development when they know about their children's cognitive ability and adapt their behavior and demands to their current level. This includes parents' responsivity to the child, especially in the form of verbal communication or by engaging the child in activities that promote learning. Parents often foster their children unintentionally, for example, while playing and engaging with them at home. Misjudging children's cognitive ability bears the risk of over- or underchallenging them. Slight overestimation has a positive impact on students' achievement, due to its motivating effect (Helmke et al., 2004). Parents' judgments of children's ability also affect decisions about children's education and future academic path. For example, children's academic self-perceptions and achievement are affected by parents' educational aspirations, which in turn, are positively related to children's cognitive ability and therefore to their judgments of children's cognitive ability. In addition, parental nomination is often the first step in the process of identifying cognitively highly able students for early entrance to school, grade skipping, or gifted programs. Without this nomination, children may miss out on opportunities for support. That is, children benefit when their parents accurately judge their cognitive ability.
Even when teachers were instructed to distinguish between academic achievement and cognitive ability in their judgments, their judgments of students' cognitive ability depended more on everyday academic performance than on cognitive ability per se (Lavrijsen & Verschueren, 2020). Our findings suggest a similar “academic achievement bias” among parents. When we controlled for students' school grades, we found no significant relationship between parents' judgments and children's cognitive ability. Parents may assume that academic achievement is more indicative of children's cognitive ability than it is. While a slight overestimation of children's cognitive abilities can be beneficial for their development, underestimation can lead to a loss of confidence, motivation, and cognitive ability in children. Notably, the relationship between parents' ratings and children's cognitive ability was weaker for more intelligent children. This finding may be explained by a ceiling effect in the parent rating scale, which makes it difficult to distinguish between above-average and high ability levels. The ceiling effect, which is indicated by a negative skewness value of the parent rating scale in our data (Skew = −.92, SE = .05), could be enhanced by the fact that parents tend to overestimate their child, which is not possible for highly intelligent children due to the upper limit of the parent rating scale, thus suppressing the strength of the correlation. [C]eiling effects in school grades prevent highly intelligent children, who are also likely to perform better academically, from receiving better grades than children with above-average ability.
Parents' judgment accuracy was significantly lower for girls compared to boys, for last-born children compared to first-born children, and for parents with no or the lowest secondary degree compared to parents with the highest secondary degree. Our finding that parents are more successful in assessing their sons' cognitive ability could be due to a tendency for parents to attribute boys' achievement to their cognitive ability rather than to motivation or effort, as is the case with girls. Within the realistic accuracy model, this would indicate that parents primarily regard achievement as a valid indicator of cognitive ability for boys, but less so for girls. Another explanation would be that parents pay more attention to their son's cognitive abilities than to their daughter's, which may lead to more observations and information searches and thus to more accurate judgments. However, this assumption is rather speculative and requires further testing.
Parents also had higher accuracy in judging first-born children compared to last-born children. Parents have known their first-born child longer than their last-born child, giving them more time to form a more accurate picture of their first-born child. Alternatively, one could speculate that as the number of children increases, parents have less time to focus on individual children and observe their abilities, which would lead to less accurate judgments for later-born children.
In line with previous research we found that higher educated parents were better at judging their children's cognitive ability than lower-educated parents. In relation to the realistic accuracy model, they may recognize indicators of cognitive ability better or be more likely to use the information correctly to arrive at an accurate judgment. Children of less educated parents, on the other hand, are judged less accurately by their parents. This might hinder their further cognitive development if parents over- or underchallenge their children. Therefore, it would be important to investigate the causes behind this relation, such as parents' knowledge about cognitive indicators, the actual time spent with their children, the involvement in their children's education, or the frequency of their exchange with teachers.
Interesting additional findings not included in our research questions showed that judgment accuracy was higher for Grades 3 and 4 than for Grades 1 and 2. Students in Grades 3 and 4 were given numerical grades, while students in Grades 1 and 2 were given verbal grades that parents had to translate into numerical grades. [O]ver time, parents may get to know their children better and become more adept at assessing their potential.
[E]specially in elementary school, accurately judging children's academic potential (i.e., cognitive ability) is important, as elementary school students have had comparatively little opportunity to acquire knowledge and skills. Therefore, parents should be made aware of possible biases in judging their children's potential, such as relying on academic achievement or on gender role stereotyped perceptions of their children's competencies. Particular attention needs to be paid to children with lower-educated parents. Teachers could be trained to talk with parents about their judgments of their children's cognitive ability and exchange their perceptions.
Our study has a cross-sectional design; therefore, no causal statements can be made. Longitudinal studies are needed to investigate possible reciprocal effects between parents' judgment accuracy and students' development. Moreover, study participation was voluntary. This could have led to a selected sample of parents with higher self-concepts of their diagnostic abilities or higher educational levels. However, the educational level of parents was comparable to that of the norm sample.
In terms of description and consequences, we need longitudinal studies that show how parents' judgments and diagnostic competencies develop across conditions and over time (e.g., how they are influenced by the amount of time parents spend with their children or the development of children's cognitive abilities) along with their children's development. Including teachers' diagnostic competencies in such a longitudinal study would be challenging, but necessary to understand the complex interplay of the co-development of others' judgments and children's abilities, competencies, or self-perceptions. A considerable amount of variance in judgment accuracy remained unexplained in our study and most of the studies in our review. Future studies should examine other moderators, such as parents' gender with sufficiently large samples of comparable size, parents' knowledge of cognitive indicators, their theories about the stability of competence, their own cognitive ability,or their diagnostic self-concept, to further explore the variance in judgment accuracy and better understand the deductive process of parents' judgment formation. Last but not least, the question of the trainability of parents' judgment accuracy and intervention effects on children's development needs more attention.
This is a large sample study that complements the first one nicely. Once again, there are several interesting findings. First, the fact that judgment of sons’ and first born’s abilities is more accurate is concerning. It’s not surprising that better educated parents have better judgments of their children’s abilities. This is a full text article. I thought it connected nicely to Muradoglu et al. in that parents’ judgments are likely to impact children’s expectations about their own potential.