Does Parental Feedback Shape Children's (over)Confidence?

Our experimental design is described in detail in the attached PDF. This includes a detailed description of our interventions.

It will involve a lab-in-the-field experiment run online with parents and with children in Norwegian secondary schools (7th grade).

2024-08-30

2025-08-30

PARENTS:

I) Belief about child's performance (Maths)
II) Belief about child's performance (Norwegian)
III) Feedback to child about the child’s performance (Maths)
IV) Feedback to child about the child’s performance (Norwegian)

CHILDREN:

i) Belief about own performance (Math): Confidence
ii) Belief about own performance (Norwegian): Confidence
iii) Competition choice

PARENTS:

I) Belief about child's performance (Maths): perceived rank, measured on a scale from 1 (best performer) to 10 (worst performer) in the mathematics quiz.
II) Belief about child's performance (Norwegian): identical to (I) except performance on the Norwegian quiz.
III) Feedback to child about the child’s performance (Maths): the rank that parents want to be communicated to their child about the rank they think their child will place in the mathematics quiz. As (I) and (II) the variable takes values from 1 (best performer) to 10 (worst performer).
IV) Feedback to child about the child’s performance (Norwegian): identical to (III) except the feedback is about the perceived performance in the Norwegian quiz.


CHILDREN:

i) Belief about own performance (Math): Perceived relative performance in the mathematics quiz. The variable takes values from 1 (best performer) to 10 (worst performer).
ii) Belief about own performance (Norwegian): same as (i) except for perceived performance in the Norwegian quiz.
iii) Competition choice: a binary variable, taking the value 1 if the child chose to compete in mathematics and 0 if the child chose to compete in Norwegian.

For parents, we are interested in examining whether they distort the feedback that they send to the child, relative to their own belief about their child’s performance. We are also interested in whether parents provide different feedback for tasks that are stereotypically congruent vs non-congruent.

For children, we are interested in observing how receiving feedback from their parent influences their confidence (beliefs) in each of the two tasks, and whether it changes their competition choice. This will allow us to examine whether the parent’s feedback shifts children’s task specialization choices.

PARENTS:

I: Reasoning feedback decision (Norwegian)
II: Reasoning feedback decision (Math)
III: Confidence in perceived rank (Norwegian)
IV: Confidence in perceived rank (Math)


CHILDREN:

i: Performance quiz (math)
ii: Performance quiz (Norwegian)
iii: Performance competition
iv: Perceived preferred parental competition choice

The variables listed above are secondary variables in the sense that we will use them to learn more about the variation in our primary outcomes of interest.

PARENTS:
I: Reasoning feedback decision (Math): this is an open ended question, asking parents to write a short explanation of their feedback choice for the Math quiz, i.e., primary outcome III.
II: Reasoning feedback decision (Norwegian): this is an open ended question, asking parents to write a short explanation of their feedback choice for the Norwegian quiz, i.e., primary outcome IV.
III: Confidence in perceived rank (Math): this variable takes values from 1–10 (from very uncertain to very certain) and measures the confidence they have in their reported belief about their child’s performance in the mathematics quiz, i.e., Primary Outcome (I).
IV: Confidence in perceived rank (Norwegian): this variable takes values from 1–10 (from very uncertain to very certain) and measures the confidence they have in their reported belief about their child’s performance in the Norwegian quiz, i.e., Primary Outcome (II).


CHILDREN:

i: Performance quiz (math): this variable measures the number of correct questions on the mathematics quiz.
ii: Performance quiz (Norwegian): this variable measures the number of correct questions on the Norwegian quiz.
iii: Performance competition: this variable measures the number of correct questions in the competition (mathematics or Norwegian).
iv: Perceived preferred parental competition choice: This is a binary variable taking the value 1 if the child thinks the parent would prefer (choose) for them to compete in mathematics, and 0 if they think their parent would prefer (choose) for them to compete in Norwegian.

ADMINISTRATIVE DATA OUTCOMES:

We will also be able to link our experimental data with administrative outcomes (past and
future) from the children and parents. These variables will not be outcomes in the sense that
we expect our treatment variation to influence these variables, but we thought it would be
worthwhile mentioning them here as we do plan to examine the relationship between
parental feedback styles and child outcomes in the administrative data. These variables are discussed more in the attached document describing our experimental design.

Our experimental design is described in detail in the attached PDF.

It will involve a lab-in-the-field experiment run online with parents and with children in Norwegian secondary schools (7th grade). We will vary the feedback that parents provide to their children, examining both how parents make their feedback decisions and the influence this has on their child's beliefs.

Not available

The randomization will be implemented by the computer program (oTree) with an equal probability (p=1/5) of being assigned to each of the five treatment conditions.

Randomization is implemented at the level of parent-child pair (meaning the parent and their child).

No

The children will take part in the experiment at their school. Randomization to the treatment groups will be done at the individual parent-child level, within schools.

We aim to collect 750 complete parent-child pairs.

Since parents and children complete the survey and experiment separately, this implies that we will collect data from some children (and possibly some parents) who are not part of a matched pair. In particular, parents need to complete their part of the survey in a short space of time in the morning before their child participates. Therefore, we expect that a fraction of the parents will not participate in time (perhaps 25%). We will still allow their child to participate in this case, but this data from children whose parents do not participate will not form part of our main dataset. These unmatched children will effectively face the T0 condition (no parental feedback), but they will constitute a selected sample. Therefore, we will continue to collect data until 750 parent-child pairs participate.

Since we expect this non-participation to take place before exposure to any treatment, we expect that it will be orthogonal to our treatment conditions.

Our anticipated effective sample size will therefore be 750 parent-child pairs, with ⅕ randomized into each of the 5 treatment conditions.

Each treatment arm in our effective sample will contain approximately the same number of participants (150), meaning that parents (along with their child) will have an equal probability (p=1/5) to being assigned of each of the five treatment arms. We will continue to recruit parent-child pairs until we reach a sample size of 750 complete parent-child pairs.

As noted above, we plan to continue to recruit parent-child pairs until we reach a sample of 750 complete parent-child pairs. They will be randomized to each of the five treatment conditions with equal probability. This will imply a sample of approximately 150 parent-child pairs in each of the 5 treatments.