Motivation and persistence: Praise effort, not talent
Here I try to summarize Carol Dweck’s research on motivation, touching on perceptions of intelligence and goal orientation. I am interested in Dweck’s research on motivation for a very personal reason: I have two young girls. If you have children you will want to check out her work for ideas about how to raise kids who are persistent and value learning. If you are an educator you will want to be familiar with it to motivate your students.
Perceptions on the nature of intelligence
Dweck writes about a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence is a fixed trait that you are born with and there is not much you can do to change it. This is also known as the entity theory of intelligence. People with a growth mindset believe that you can make yourself smarter through hard work and effort. This is also know as the incremental theory of intelligence.
How do these mindsets show themselves in a kid’s behavior? Because kids with a fixed mindset believe you cannot change your intelligence, they tend to believe that if they cannot perform some task (solve a problem, do something, answer a question), they must be stupid. Therefore, they tend to give up easily or avoid confronting difficult problems altogether.
Kids with a growth mindset, on the other hand, tend to view challenges as learning opportunities. When they encounter a challenging problem, they might think that they just need to learn some new skill in order to solve it. They do not denigrate themselves and call themselves stupid. Kids with a growth mindset also tend to persist in trying to solve a problem more than kids with a fixed mindset; they try different strategies or seek help from a more knowledgeable person.
The way we interact with kids can encourage them to develop one type of mindset over the other. For example, when you praise a kid for being really smart, you actually encourage him to develop a fixed mindset. Praising a kid for trying hard, on the other hand, encourages him to develop a growth mindset.
Dweck and her researchers showed just how much our praise can influence a kid’s mindset. They presented a group of kids with a puzzle that they would be able to solve. They praised one group of kids by telling them they did a great job and must be smart; they praised the other group by telling them they did a great job, they must have tried really hard.
Later, these same kids were given the opportunity to try another puzzle, only this time they were offered a choice in the level of difficulty. The kids who were praised for being smart tended to choose the easy puzzle while the kids praised for effort tended to choose the more challenging puzzle. This is an important point to remember: kids with a fixed mindset only care about looking smart and avoiding looking dumb. To them, exerting any sort of effort means you must be dumb because smart people can just do things without any effort. Fixed mindset kids might say something like, “Oh that’s so easy, I could do it if I wanted to but I just don’t feel like it.”
There are more studies that demonstrate the same basic idea. You will be glad to know that the findings hold up across different groups, whether it be culture or age.
Goal orientation mediates response to challenges
There’s more to the story than just a fixed or growth mindset. A person’s goal orientation plays a part in determining how she will respond to a challenge.
There are two types of goal orientations: performance and mastery. Performance goals have to do with executing some action or performance, typically in comparison with others. This is the typical goal I would venture to say most classrooms encourage–encouraging a little “friendly” competition to motivate students to perform at higher levels. If you teach, you know this is also a nightmare as students only care about the grade and not learning. Perhaps in a past class you wanted to explore some topic further and had a student ask if it would be on the test. If you replied “no” and noticed the class tuning you out, it’s probably because they had a performance goal orientation.
In contrast, people who pursue mastery goals are looking to increase their competence, to learn something, to understand something better, or to master some procedure or topic. In the example above, mastery-oriented students would have remained attentive and engaged as you explored a perhaps tangential topic that might increase their understanding of the original topic.
Below is a simple chart I put together to help me sort out the differences between performance and mastery goal orientations.
The significant thing to take away from this discussion is that teachers can impact student motivation by framing classroom learning goals as mastery goals for students.
The good news: Mindsets and goal orientations are not engraved in stone
Even if you find that your child or students have fixed mindsets and performance goal orientations, you can influence them to become more growth oriented. While Dweck does not provide much detail about the program, she led a study in which she put two groups of middle school kids through a study skills-type training. One group received training in study skills only while the other group received training in study skills and mindset. The teachers, who did not know which kids were in which group, could pick out the ones from the mindset training group: they thrived. The important thing to take away from this is that study skills alone were not enough to improve performance. If you work in developmental education or with students in developmental ed programs, you might want to incorporate some mindset training with your normal work.
What to share with students and teachers
I try to talk to instructors and get them to give me a few minutes of class time to talk about mindset. A typical session goes like this:
- Introduce myself and why I’m there
- Open discussion: What do you think about intelligence? Are you born smart? Can you make yourself smarter?
- Think about the brain as a muscle that can be exercised
- Brief video on how the brain works–neurons and synapses firing and making new network connections
- Traumatic brain injury patients: other parts of the brain take over the function of damaged parts
- Brief video of girl who had hemispherectomy
- Multiple intelligences–brief video of Howard Gardner talking about the case for MI, based on brain research
- Open discussion on goal orientation: When you sign up for a class, are you interested in what you’ll learn, or do you just care about getting a good grade?
- If students or the instructor is interested, I can give a survey to determine mindset and goal orientation
I can actually fit all that in in about 30 minutes.
I would actually like to work with our Learning Center to either integrate mindset with their current programming or offer a separate session or workshop. I also think this should be part of our College Success Strategies course that all new students have to take. (Remember: study skills alone are not enough!)
Check out my collected mindset resources on del.icio.us.
If you’re really interested, check out:
Dweck, C. S. (2000). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
