Abstract
Theory of mind —children’s understanding of themselves and others in terms of internal mental states, such as thoughts, wants, and emotions— influences children’s transition to school and their success within school. This article reviews evidence showing that theory of mind influences school-age children’s relationships with their peers and teachers, and thus their adjustment to school. It also influences children’s academic motivation within school and for school tasks. Theory of mind further directly influences children’s successful performance on, and strategies for undertaking, academic tasks, such as reading and mathematics. Moreover, it fosters children’s abilities to provide explanations, which in turn help them learn new material more effectively from teacher instruction and from school textbook material.
Highlights
Theory of mind —children’s understanding of themselves and others in terms of internal mental states, such as thoughts, wants, and emotions— influences children’s transition to school and their success within school
Much of the empirical findings in this first section focus on theory of mind developments in the preschool years, as does much of the extant research in the field. This sort of social cognition continues to progress beyond the preschool years with several advances apparent as children make the transition to their school years
It provides a skeletal framework for thinking about theory of mind in relation to school settings and school accomplishments, and provides examples of emerging research on various topics outlined by that framework
Summary
Child judges that two persons (the child vs. someone else) have different desires about the same object: Given two possible snacks (ice cream, an egg), child states his preference but must predict snack choice of other person (who has the opposite preference). Research has shown that this six-step ToM Scale does effectively assess a developing progression of ToM insights that extends to older children (8- to 13-year-olds) and even in some cases adults (O’Reilly, Peterson, & Wellman, 2014; Peterson, Wellman, & Slaughter, 2012). This extended scale provides one effective way to test school-age children. Even if the scale is not used, it points to several sorts of post-false-belief items (e.g., Hidden Emotion and Sarcasm) that can be used for testing ToM in school-age children
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