Human Development & Quantitative Methodology

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2248

The departments within the College of Education were reorganized and renamed as of July 1, 2011. This department incorporates the former departments of Measurement, Statistics & Evaluation; Human Development; and the Institute for Child Study.

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    CHILDREN’S UNDERSTANDING OF MERIT IN FAIR RESOURCE ALLOCATION
    (2017) Noh, Jee Young; Killen, Melanie; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    While previous studies have documented children’s consideration of merit in fairness decisions, less is known about specifically how merit has been conceptualized by children, as effort and outcome were confounded in merit (Baumard et al., 2012; Kienbaum & Wilkening, 2009). Thus, the current study aimed to disentangle these two components of merit in understanding children’s conceptions of fairness. One hundred children (3 to 6 year-olds and 7 to 10 year-olds) participated in this study. Children’s understanding of merit was documented in four contexts: a) when effort and outcome were confounded (baseline), b) when outcome was controlled (i.e., when the level of effort was varied), c) when effort was controlled (i.e., when the level of outcome was varied), and d) when given the opportunity to prioritize either effort or outcome. Novel findings were that with increasing age, children prioritized effort over outcome and thus found it to be fair when more resources were allocated to the hardworking peer than to the productive peer. That is, older children were more likely to focus on the positive intentions of an act rather than positive consequences compared to younger children. In addition, when merit was examined when effort and outcome was controlled, children were still able to take into consideration for merit, thereby allocating more resources to a peer who was hardworking over a peer who was lazy (when outcome was the same) and to a peer who was productive over a peer who was unproductive (when effort was the same). Interesting findings were revealed when authority figures’ messages were present: all-aged children rejected a teacher’s allocation decision that was against merit; however, older children rejected a teacher’s equal allocation decision while younger children found a teacher’s equal allocation to be okay. The current study made a significant contribution to the current literature by examining the process in which children integrate two different aspects of merit in their fairness decisions.
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    The Role of College Students' Perceptions of Effort Source on Self-Evaluations of Academic Ability
    (2016) Muenks, Katherine; Wigfield, Allan; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In the present studies I investigated whether college students’ perceptions of effort source influenced their perceptions of the relation between levels of their own effort and ability in mathematics. In Study 1 (N = 210), I found using hypothetical vignettes that perceptions of task-elicited effort (i.e., effort that arises due to the subjective difficulty or ease of the task) led to perceptions of an inverse relation between one’s effort and ability, and perceptions of self-initiated effort (i.e., effort that arises due to one’s own motivation or lack of motivation) led to perceptions of a positive relation between one’s effort and ability, consistent with my hypotheses and prior research. In Study 2 (N = 160), participants completed an academic task and I used open-ended questions to manipulate their perceptions of effort source. I found that participants in the task-elicited condition endorsed no overall relation between effort and ability, and participants in the self-initiated condition endorsed an overall inverse relation, which is inconsistent with my hypotheses and prior research. Possible explanations for the findings, as well as broader theoretical and educational implications are discussed.