 12. Personality Development in Middle Childhood  295
incompetent) (Elliot & Hulleman, 2017). 
Having mastery-  approach goals, at least 
in childhood, increases self-  efficacy, im -
proves learning, and increases intrinsic mo -
tivation for learning; performance-  approach 
goals predict better academic self-  concept 
and achievement, whereas performance- 
avoidance goals are associated with lower 
achievement and higher anxiety (Wigfield 
et al., 2015). These goals have only low to 
moderate stability in late childhood and 
adolescence, and like intrinsic motivation, 
both mastery and performance goals de -
crease from the end of childhood into ado -
lescence (Wigfield et al., 2015; Zheng et al., 
2019). There is some preliminary evidence 
that individual differences in mastery goals 
may be shaped more by environmental fac -
tors in middle childhood and more by ge -
netic influences by high school (Zheng et 
al., 2019). Although it is clear that children 
vary on these important goals by the end of 
middle childhood, these goals remain a rela -
tively understudied topic in childhood, with 
only 20 studies examining them in elemen -
tary schoolchildren until around 2010 (Hul -
leman, Schrager, Bodmann, & Harackie -
wicz, 2010). Furthermore, because they are 
typically assessed using self-  report question -
naires, most childhood studies have focused 
on older children who can complete these 
measures, and far less is known about them 
at the start of middle childhood.
School-  age children also vary widely in 
goals for their relationships with peers. Crick 
and Dodge (1994) offered a highly influen -
tial model of children’s individual differenc -
es in social information processing that in -
cluded youths’ social goals as an important 
component; according to this model, after 
youth take in relevant information about 
social situations, they formulate goals for 
these interactions that guide their behavior. 
Several recent studies have suggested that 
children may have general tendencies in the 
social goals that they typically pursue with 
peers. These social goals are similar in struc -
ture to three of the achievement goal orien -
tations described earlier—  specifically, they 
include how much youth want to improve 
their social skills and relationships (mastery- 
approach goals), impress others with their 
popularity (performance-  approach goals), 
and avoid feeling embarrassed or rejected (performance-  avoidance goals) (Rodkin, 
Ryan, Jamison, & Wilson, 2013). Or, in 
other words, children vary in how much 
they aim at “developing relationships, being 
cool, and not looking like a loser” (Rudolph, 
Abaied, Flynn, Sugimura, & Agoston, 2011, 
p. 1518). Children also vary in how much 
they pursue communal  goals that are aimed 
at developing positive relationships with 
others and agentic  goals focused on obtain -
ing status and power (Caravita & Cillessen, 
2011). All of these social goal orientations 
have important implications for children’s 
peer relationships, including their experi -
ences with bullying, responses to peer ag -
gression and aggressiveness, popularity, and 
likability (Caravita & Cillessen, 2011; Rod -
kin et al., 2013; Rudolph et al., 2011), and 
are worthy of far more investigation.
Values
As noted previously, during middle child -
hood, children are expected to learn about 
the values of their particular families, cul -
tural groups, and broader societies, and they 
begin to establish their own values as well. 
In a special issue on the development of val -
ues in childhood and adolescence, Döring, 
Daniel, and Knafo-Noam (2016) described 
values: “Values convey what is important 
to a person; they express the key goals that 
guide us in life” and “Values are at the core 
of person’s self-  concept and identity, as they 
define who somebody is” (p. 472). Thus, val -
ues are broader than the specific goals de -
scribed in the previous section; they express 
people’s most important motivations across 
situations. Research on attachment, achieve -
ment motivation, and moral development 
has explored aspects of children’s values to 
some extent (Killen, 2016), but individual 
differences in the full range of children’s val -
ues have not been studied empirically within 
psychology until recently, perhaps because 
measures were not available for assessing 
them in children.
A couple of different measures for as -
sessing values in childhood—  one based on 
pictures and another using simplified text—
have recently been developed (Döring et al., 
2015; Kandler, Gottschling, & Spinath, 
2016), enabling exploration of this impor -
tant individual difference earlier in life. 