David B. Miele

Children's Naive Theories of Intelligence Influence Their Metacognitive Judgments

Recent studies have shown that the metacognitive judgments adults infer from their experiences of encoding effort vary in accordance with their naive theories of intelligence. To determine whether this finding extends to elementary schoolchildren, a study was conducted in which 27 third graders (M(age) = 8.27) and 24 fifth graders (M(age) = 10.39) read texts presented in easy- or difficult-to-encode fonts. The more children in both grades viewed intelligence as fixed, the less likely they were to interpret effortful or difficult encoding as a sign of increasing mastery and the more likely they were to report lower levels of comprehension as their perceived effort increased. This suggests that children may use naive theories of intelligence to make motivationally relevant inferences earlier than previously thought.

Metacognition of agency and theory of mind in adults with high functioning autism.

We investigated metacognition of agency in adults with high functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome (HFA/AS) using a computer task in which participants moved the mouse to get the cursor to touch the downward moving Xs and avoid the Os. They were then asked to make judgments of performance and judgments of agency. Objective control was either undistorted, or distorted by adding turbulence (i.e., random noise) or a time Lag between the mouse and cursor movements. Participants with HFA/AS used sensorimotor cues available in the turbulence and lag conditions to a lesser extent than control participants in making their judgments of agency. Furthermore, the failure to use these internal diagnostic cues to their own agency was correlated with decrements in a theory of mind task. These findings suggest that a reduced sensitivity to veridical internal cues about the sense of agency is related to mentalizing impairments in autism.

Students’ Thinking About Effort and Ability: The Role of Developmental, Contextual, and Individual Difference Factors

Students’ thinking about the relation between effort and ability can influence their motivation, affect, and academic achievement. Students sometimes think of effort as inversely related to ability (such that people with low ability must work harder than people with high ability) and other times think of effort as positively related to ability (such that hard work can lead people to develop high levels of ability). The purposes of the present review are (a) to review literature on developmental, contextual, and individual difference factors that influence students’ thinking about the relation between effort and ability in school and (b) to identify unresolved questions in this literature and present an extended theoretical framework that can help answer these questions. By providing researchers with a better understanding of how students think about effort and ability, we hope that this review will inspire new research in this area.