The effects of incentives and instructions on children's allocation of study time

Abstract

So far, research on children's allocation of study time has shown that, even though most young children can distinguish between easy and hard learning materials, they do not use this knowledge for further regulation of study time. To explore possible underlying mechanisms, we examined whether task characteristics can be created that facilitate children's appropriate use of study time. We investigated the effects of incentives and instructions (accuracy vs. speed emphasized) in 69 seven-year-old and 79 nine-year-old children's self-paced study times for easy (highly associated) and hard (unrelated) item pairs. Overall, the results confirm the findings obtained in previous studies, with older children differentiating more between easy and difficult learning materials in their study time. Regarding the effects of instructions, the study revealed that only 9-year-olds studied significantly longer when accuracy was emphasized. In contrast to our expectations, this increase in study time was not accompanied by an increase in subsequent recall. No differences in the study times were found as a function of presence/absence of incentives. The results are discussed both in terms of developmental progression taking place and in terms of the general theory of self-paced study time.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; AZ: SO 213/12 – 3). Special thanks are due to Michael Pressley for making this research possible in his laboratory. We are also grateful to David Bjorklund, Holger Elischberger and Claudia Roebers for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.