About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 4. Cognitive Processes

Abstract

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Persistence in the face of difficulty is an important part of achieving successful outcomes in life. Task difficulty is often described by children and adults using labels like “easy” and “hard” (Bennett-Pierre et al., 2023). What do children understand and believe about these labels, which are frequently used to describe effort in everyday interactions, educational settings, and research paradigms? Investigating how children begin to understand these labels in context may be important for understanding children’s developing decisions to take on or avoid challenges.

In the current study, 5- to 8-year-olds (N=78, Mean age= 84.4 months) were asked a series of questions to probe their understanding of the labels “easy” and “hard.” First, children were asked to describe what it means to do something easy and what it means to do something hard. Next, children were asked to provide examples of when they had done something easy and hard. Children’s definitions of easy and hard were coded as either containing a response that reflected a metacognitive understanding of effort as a process or a response that did not meet this definition (i.e., a “process” definition, similar to Sobel & Letourneau, 2015). Examples were coded as physical activities that involve the body (e.g., athletics), those that were not exclusively physical, involving the mind (e.g., academics, puzzles, art), and other, irrelevant examples that were not included in the analyses.

Preliminary analyses revealed a significant positive correlation between age and the proportion of non-physical examples children generated, rho(60) = .29, p = .02. Moreover, children who generated a process definition for hard were more likely to generate non-physical examples of hard things they had done, rho(67) =.30, p = .01. This relation did not hold for their definitions of easy and examples of what they thought was easy, rho(68) = .17, p = .17. Further, controlling for age, children who provided process definitions were more likely to generate non-physical examples, rho(60) =.27, p = .04.

Taken together, these findings indicate that children’s reasoning about their own definitions of hard and their examples of hard tasks may be related, but their definitions of easy and their examples of easy tasks may not be. This suggests that children may conceptualize these scalar factors of effort difficulty differently. A second study (presently being planned) that measures children’s metacognitive process definitions of what they think is easy and hard, and asks children to categorize events as easy and hard will further elucidate the relations among the development of children’s metacognitive reflections about difficulty and the nature of their examples.

Author information

Author	Role
Sarah L. Kiefer, Brown University	Presenting author
Oliva Vezina, Brown University	Non-presenting author
David M. Sobel, Brown University	Non-presenting author

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