Mothers' Perceptions about Their Children's Cognitive Abilities
Sung Hee Park
Abstract
The purpose of the present research was to study mothers` perceptions about their children` cognitive abilities and the relations between such perceptions and the children`s cognitive level, The subjects of this study were 60 children (mean age: 6 years 1 month: age range = 5;8 to 6;7) and their mothers. Each child responded to 18 tasks drawn from the Kodae-Binet IQ test. Subsequently, the mothers were asked 4 questions: an estimate of her child`s success or failure on the tasks, a rating of the certainty of her judgment, an estimate of the age of mastery on each task both for her own child and children in general. The data of the present study were analyzed with the 3-way ANOVA (sex x birth order x mother`s education level), t-test, and Pearson correlation coefficient. Significant differences were found in (1) mothers` accuracy of their children`s cognitive abilities according to children`s birth order, (2) mothers` accuracy, overestimation, and certainty according to the level of difficulty of each task, and (3) mothers` estimate of age at mastery according to the level of each task. Furthermore, there were positive correlations between accurate predictions by the mother and correct answers by the child and between overestimations by the mother and correct answers by the child.
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