Regularities in the development of children's causality beliefs about school performance across six sociocultural contexts.

Abstract

We examined whether children's (Grades 2-6) causality beliefs about school performance show similar developmental profiles across 6 distinct sociocultural settings (Los Angeles, n = 657; Tokyo, n = 817; East Berlin, n = 313; West Berlin, n = 517; Moscow, n = 551; Prague, n = 768) with the Means-Ends subscale of the tripartite Control, Agency, and Means-Ends Interview. Although previous research on these same children has shown sizable differences in their self-related agency and control-expectancy beliefs, we found markedly similar developmental patterns in their beliefs about the importance of effort, ability, luck, teachers, and unknown factors as causes of school performance. These regularities in children's implicit theories of school suggest that factors such as cognitive maturation, adaptive self-regulatory processes, and commonalities in educational goals are quite uniform influences in shaping school-related causality beliefs.

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