Students often receive encouragement ("You can do it!") to take on and stick with challenges, yet they don’t always listen. Past work suggests that domain knowledge underlies speaker credibility. We propose that students find encouragement more or less motivating based not only on the speaker’s domain knowledge (e.g., math), but also on their knowledge of the student’s abilities (e.g., math abilities). Adolescents (n=369; ages 11-19) said they would be more likely to seek out and listen to encouragement from a hypothetical person who has both knowledge of the domain and their abilities compared to someone who has knowledge of just one or neither. When asked to reason about real people in their lives (parents, teachers, peers), knowledge of domain and ability also significantly predicted whose encouragement participants would seek out and listen to. Ongoing work is experimentally testing this hypothesis with behavioral measures of persistence and challenge-seeking.

Tracking one’s performance over time is essential to efficientself-guided learning but it is not clear whether young childrencan accurately monitor their past performance. Here, welooked at whether 4-6-year-olds can use the trajectory of theirpast performance to allocate future resources. Across fourexperiments (N = 274), we found that children were sensitiveto their rate of change in past performance: Children assignedto a condition in which they got better over time were morelikely to take on challenges and teach others than children inconditions where they got worse or stayed the same.Furthermore, children privileged their rate and direction ofchange more than their total or final score. These resultssuggest that young children monitor their rate of improvementand can use this information to guide their future efforts.