The Effects of Self-Assisted Monitoring on Children's Recall Predictions

Abstract

Young children consistently overestimate their judgments of how well they will perform on a picture recall task compared to their actual performance (Flavell, Friedrichs, & Hoyt, 1970; Lipko-Speed, 2013; Lipko, Dunlosky, & Merriman, 2009). Previous researchers have investigated ways to make children more aware of their actual abilities (Lipko-Speed, 2013; Schneider, 1998; Stipek, Roberts, & Sanborn, 1984). This study examines the influence of self-assisted monitoring on young children’s overconfidence. Specifically, children will monitor their own performance on a recall task with the help of an experimenter. Such monitoring is expected to lower children’s overconfidence in their future performance predictions on a recall task. 50 four- and five- year olds were randomly matched by gender to one of two groups: an experimenter monitored group or a self-assisted monitored group. All children participated in four trials of a picture recall task during which they made 2 recall predictions and 2 recall attempts per trial, each with different sets of pictures. The procedure for the experimenter monitored group was modeled after Lipko-Speed (2013). Specifically, after each recall attempt, children were told by the experimenter, who had been monitoring their recall, how many pictures they had correctly recalled. In the self-assisted monitored group, children (with some assistance) monitored the accuracy of their own recall attempts. Both groups lowered their predictions within and between trials, however their overconfidence persisted. Children’s overconfident performance predictions did not decrease within or between trials in either group. Hence, the implementation of this investigation’s self-assisted monitoring task did not aid in decreasing children’s overconfident judgment predictions on future tasks.