Effects of age and achievement goals on children's motives for attending to peers' work

Children often look at one another's work, but it is not always clear why they do so. It was proposed that attending to peers' work serves both informational and motivational functions. First, such attention can provide information relevant either to improving one's products or to self-evaluation. Second, interest in both product improvement and self-evaluation may be guided either by strivings to develop competence (mastery goal), or by strivings to demonstrate superior ability (performance goal). Ninety-eight Kl (mean age 5.10) and 196 grade 4 (mean age 9.9) Israeli children attending either urban or kibbutz schools were filmed as they worked on an activity in either a mastery or a performance goal condition. They then explained two of their filmed glances, one at an earlier and one at a later stage of task engagement. As predicted, the degree to which children gave product improvement or self-evaluation reasons differed by age and stages of task engagement, since self-evaluation reasons were more common at grade 4 and for later glances. In contrast, the frequency of mastery versus performance reasons depended on the experimental goal conditions and on the degree to which the school environment emphasized mastery learning goals (kibbutz schools) or performance learning goals (urban schools). Thus, mastery reasons were more common in the mastery than in the performance condition and among kibbutz rather than urban children. Children who gave mastery reasons displayed higher intrinsic task motivation. Implications for the development of social comparison and optimal motivation for learning are discussed.