competence and performance

Question 1

COMPETANCE

Answer 1

what a person is capable of
	Underlying capabilities
	Their ‘true’ or ‘core’ abilities
	What is a new born baby capable of?
	(Concept comes from ‘linguistic competence’)

Question 2

PERFORMANCE

Answer 2

what a person does
 How a sports-person performs ‘on the day’
 How you perform on a test
 ‘I just didn’t do myself justice….’

Question 3

main differences

Answer 3

• Competence is invisible/unmeasurable

* Performance is measurable

Question 4

the problem

Answer 4

 We often want to know about competence
 BUT we can only observe performance (what a person does)
 Competence can only be inferred from performance…
 …and performance often mis-represents competence

Question 5

performance misrepresenting competence

Answer 5

• Why?
• What factors can affect performance?
 Environmental conditions
 Within-person factors
 Between-person factors (focus of this lecture)
• e.g. Assumptions/expectations of the observer
• The interpretations of the researcher/observer
 Disability: movement disorders, for example
• Under what circumstances might researchers make the wrong inferences?

Question 6

mismeasurement

Answer 6

• The further apart the worlds of the researcher, and the person being ‘researched’ are, the greater the likelihood of misinterpreting observed performance
 Cultural differences
 Dis/ability (‘nothing about us without us…’)
 Age and Power
• One risk is that performance of the ‘observed’ will be misinterpreted/misunderstood by the ‘observer’
 Labov (1969) – white Educational Psychologists misunderstanding the social world of black NYC children
 Gould (1982)

Question 7

Piagets stage theory

Answer 7

• Piaget gives us a comprehensive theory of intellectual development
• A ‘stage’ theory
 Sensorimotor (to approx 18 mths)
 Pre-operational (18mths to approx 7 yrs)
 Concrete operational (7 yrs to approx 12 yrs)
 Formal operational (12 yrs and older)

Question 8

pre-operational stage

Answer 8

• In the pre-operational stage (c. 1.5 – 7 yrs) children:
 Are perceptually egocentric
 Don’t reverse mental operations (can’t ‘undo’ thoughts)
 Don’t conserve (they go more on appearance and don’t ‘hold onto’ the fundamental properties of things…)
 Fundamental properties such as volume, mass, number

Question 9

Conservation of number:

Answer 9

• Two rows of counters, equal number in each
• “Are there more counters in this row or this row or are there the same number?”
 Child answers (usually correctly)
• Transformation
• “Are there more counters in this row or this row or are there the same number?”
 Child answers
 Non-conservers say that one row now has more.

Question 10

Conservation:

Answer 10

• Conservation of mass, volume and length
 ‘critical attributes’ (fundamental properties)
• Pre-operational children behave in a way that causes observers to infer that they are not able to conserve
 The children focus on how things ‘appear to be’
• But was Piaget being mislead by performance? Are there other ways of doing the task that reveal higher levels of competence?

Question 11

Analysing the conservation task

Answer 11

• Methodology toolkit: Demand characteristics?
 Under what circumstances do children get asked the same question twice?
 What is being ‘demanded’ of the child (from the child’s point of view) when they are asked the same question for a second time?

Question 12

Samuel and Bryant (1984)…

Answer 12

• …reasoned that asking the same question twice prompted children to change their answer
 If the answer changes it will be wrong
• Compared performance of children:
 One group did traditional format of task
 Other group did format with only post-transformation question

Question 13

McGarrigle & Donaldson (1975)

Answer 13

 Two rows of counters, equal number in each
 Transformation: ‘Naughty Teddy’ swoops in from under desk & ‘messes up’ the counters
 Children perform better on this than on traditional format
 The ‘accidental’ transformation makes sense to the child, and ‘permits’ them to give the same answer for a second time

Question 14

competence and performance

Answer 14

• Slight alteration to procedure produces better performance
• In the standard task performance errors are masking underlying competence
• Think through the implications of this empirical demonstration
 just like ‘demand characteristics’ can be used to critically evaluate many studies…
 …so too can the concepts of competence and performance
 e.g. the paper by Labov can be framed in terms of competence and performance