Young children tend to overestimate their performance on school tasks and motor tasks (e.g. jumping) because they feel overconfident about managing new tasks and challenges. But previous studies were conducted almost exclusively among children growing up in Western cultures. To figure out whether the finding of young children’s overestimation of performance generalizes to children from diverse cultural backgrounds, Xia et al. (2022) conducted a cross-cultural study to investigate Chinese young children’s performance estimates of a cognitive and a motor task in comparison to Dutch children.
A total of 101 Chinese children and 98 Dutch children aged from 4 to 5 were recruited to participate in the study. Each child performed the ball-throwing task first and then completed a memory task 2 to 14 days after. In a trial of the ball-throwing task, the child made an estimate about how far he/she thought he/she could throw the ball and then threw the ball at him/herself. The child also watched a peer throwing a ball in a video and made an estimate of how far he/she thought the peer in the video would throw the ball. In a trial of the memory task, each child was shown 15 blank cards and asked to estimate the number of cards he/she thought he/she could remember. The child was then given 15 picture cards to look at for 15 seconds, and was asked to report the picture cards they remembered. Each child also reported the number of picture cards that he/she thought a peer in a video could remember.
What Xia et al. (2022) found was that both Chinese and Dutch children overestimated their performance on the cognitive and motor tasks. Children also overestimated their peer’s performance on both tasks. These results suggested that self-overestimation of novel tasks applies to both Western and East Asian children. There was no evidence showing that children would overestimate their own performance more than their peer’s performance, but Chinese children estimated their own ball-throwing performance to be worse than their peer’s performance. Such differences may be a result of different cultural values. While Western cultures encourage children to be independent and “stand out” from others, East Asian cultures value interpersonal cohesion and applaud for “fitting in”. Chinese children may learn to be modest about their abilities and accomplishments when communicating with others and therefore estimate their own performance as worse than the performance of their peers. Moreover, Xia et al. also found that the performance feedback children obtained from previous trials of the cognitive and motor tasks did not influence their subsequent estimation of their performance. Perhaps children do not make consistent use of their performance feedback when making future performance predictions.
Xia et al. 's (2022) study has several implications for future research. For instance, since children's positive bias toward their performance on new tasks may have some adaptable benefits such as encouraging young children to persist in the face of failure, researchers may look at whether children who overestimate their performance persist longer in challenging activities in comparison to those who make relatively more realistic self-estimation. Researchers can also investigate the underlying mechanism of children’s self-overestimation by comparing estimates of future performance of children who do and do not receive performance feedback. It is possible that children continue to overestimate their performance regardless of feedback because they are not good at incorporating performance feedback into the estimation of future performance.
In relation to EPIC’s research in failure, Xia et al. 's findings pointed out that children may not learn from failure and continue to do poorly at certain academic tasks because they do not fully incorporate their previous failure experience into future performance estimates. Such deficiency in incorporation may influence children’s choice of efficient learning strategies and thus lead to continuous low performance.
To learn more about Xia et al.’s (2022) study, retrieve the article at: https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.13709
Reference:
Xia, M., Poorthuis, A. M., Zhou, Q., & Thomaes, S. (2022). Young children’s overestimation of performance: A cross‐cultural comparison. Child Development, 93(2), 207-221.