Children's overestimation of performance across age, task, and historical time: A meta‐analysis

Mengtian Xia; Astrid M. G. Poorthuis; Sander Thomaes

doi:10.1111/cdev.14042

Children's overestimation of performance across age, task, and historical time: A meta‐analysis

Mengtian Xia^*, Astrid M. G. Poorthuis, Sander Thomaes

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

Children tend to overestimate their performance on a variety of tasks and activities. The present meta-analysis examines the specificity of this phenomenon across age, tasks, and more than five decades of historical time (1968–2021). Self-overestimation was operationalized as the ratio between children's prospective self-estimates of task performance and their actual (i.e., objectively measured) task performance. A total of 246 effect sizes from 43 published articles were analyzed (4277 participants; 49.6% girls; sample mean ages range from 4 to 12; 86.0% of studies conducted in North America or Europe). Children's self-overestimation was robust across tasks, with their estimates of performance being 1.3 times their actual performance. In addition, children's self-overestimation decreased with sample age and increased with the year of data collection.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1001-1022
Number of pages	22
Journal	Child Development
Volume	95
Issue number	3
Early online date	24 Nov 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14042
Publication status	Published - May 2024

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© 2023 The Authors. Child Development published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Research in Child Development.

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Child Development - 2023 - Xia - Children s overestimation of performance across age task and historical time AFinal published version, 2.27 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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abstract = "Children tend to overestimate their performance on a variety of tasks and activities. The present meta-analysis examines the specificity of this phenomenon across age, tasks, and more than five decades of historical time (1968–2021). Self-overestimation was operationalized as the ratio between children's prospective self-estimates of task performance and their actual (i.e., objectively measured) task performance. A total of 246 effect sizes from 43 published articles were analyzed (4277 participants; 49.6\% girls; sample mean ages range from 4 to 12; 86.0\% of studies conducted in North America or Europe). Children's self-overestimation was robust across tasks, with their estimates of performance being 1.3 times their actual performance. In addition, children's self-overestimation decreased with sample age and increased with the year of data collection.",

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Children's overestimation of performance across age, task, and historical time: A meta‐analysis

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