Kindergarten through eighth-grade children were presented with two revisions (luck and skill) of the Matching Familiar Figures Test. Questioning about performance of hypothetical others revealed four levels of differentiation of luck and skill. These levels showed parallels with age-related changes in conceptions of difficulty, effort, and…

The central idea behind this study is that at about seven years of age the concept of normative difficulty emerges, resulting in changes in interpretation of terms such as "hard" and "easy," as well as of normative cues. (Author/DB)

Two experiments tested the idea that the means by which children acquire efficacy information can produce different levels of task motivation and self-perception of competence. In Experiment 1, children periodically received either ability attributional feedback, effort feedback, ability plus effort feedback, or no attributional feedback. Although…