Structure of Children’s Reasoning About Attributes of School Success and Failure

Abstract

Second and third graders’ competence to integrate knowledge of their ability and effort, as they would function in the child’s success on a reading task, was examined. Forty adults were also asked to evaluate the effects of ability and effort on the children’s future success. The children treated the negation and reciprocal relationships among the ability and effort attributes consistently and in ways not significantly different from the ways adults evaluated the effects of the child’s effort and ability on success and failure.