Preschool-Age Children's Performance Expectations for Themselves and Another Child as a Function of the Incentive Value of Success and the Salience of Past Performance

Abstract

STIPEK, DEBORAH J.; ROBERTS, THERESA A.; and SANBORN, MARY E. Preschool-Age Children's Performance Expectations for Themselves and Another Child as a Function of the Incentive Value of Success and the Salience of Past Performance. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1984, 55, 1983-1989. 4-year-old children predicted performance outcomes for themselves after they had experienced a series of failures, or for another child after the other child had been observed experiencing the same series of failures. The incentive value of success was manipulated by offering a reward for perfect success; the salience of past failure outcomes was manipulated by providing tangible representation of past performance. When a reward was not offered and past performance was not made salient, children had significantly higher expectations for their own future performance than for the future performance of another child. A reward made contingent on the other child's success raised expectations for the other child to about the same level as children's expectations for their own unrewarded performance. Making past performance salient had the effect of significantly lowering children's expectations for their own future performance. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that, although young children sometimes fail to differentiate their desires from their expectations, they can make relatively realistic judgments about future performance if their attention is directed to past performance information.

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