Children's Representations of Ability and their Changes During the First School Year

The present study was designed to develop a method and related coding systems for examining changes in children's representations of ability during the first school year. Children (n = 19) of ages six and seven were interviewed three times during a school year. The interview included two tasks: first, the children were asked to group their classmates on the basis of similarity and to justify their groupings; second, they were requested to name those classmates whom they would like to have on their team for different academic contests and as playmates and, again, to give reasons for their choices. The findings suggest that the impact of school and its differential concept of ability show up in the appraisal of theoretical subjects, reading and mathematics, where the use of social reasons almost disappeared, making way for an increased use of performance-based qualitative criteria.