1. family and parenting
2. children

Mindsets and Motivation as the
Keys to Academic Success
Center for Children & Families
Spring Lecture Series
March 27, 2015
How do we ensure
children’s success in
school?
Motivation
• Most of us tend to think of
motivation in terms of
encouragement.
Intentions don’t always work out:
Intentions don’t always work out:
• Responding to successes with praise, or to
failures with comfort or offers of help can be
harmful.
Intentions don’t always work out:
• Responding to successes with praise, or to
failures with comfort or offers of help can be
harmful.
• Responding to failures with anger, blame, or
by withholding help can encourage students
to try harder.
Intentions don’t always work out:
• Building confidence doesn’t help.
• Giving students opportunities
success doesn’t help.
for
Intentions don’t always work out:
• Telling students to try harder is only helpful
if they didn’t try.
Intentions don’t always work out:
• Telling students to try harder is only helpful
if they didn’t try.
• Understanding how students
interpret our messages is the
key.
Teacher behaviors give students
indirect cues about cause
Teacher’s
attribution for
student’s
outcome
Student infers
attribution of
teacher
Pity vs. Anger
Praise vs. Blame
Help vs. Neglect
Self-ascription
to ability or
effort
Expectancy,
Esteem-related
affect,
Performance,
etc.
Children’s understanding of ability
and effort changes with development
• Children understand the concept of effort as
controllable and unstable before they
understand the concept of ability as
uncontrollable and stable.
Children’s understanding of ability
and effort changes with development
• Children understand the concept of effort as
controllable and unstable before they
understand the concept of ability as
uncontrollable and stable.
• Before middle childhood, children tend to
view ability as fluctuating and modifiable
through practice and effort (i.e., controllable
and unstable).
Pity vs. Anger
• Sixth-graders were given impossible puzzles to
solve, and the “teacher” responded with
either pity, anger, or no emotional reaction.
Pity vs. Anger
• Sixth-graders were given impossible puzzles to
solve, and the “teacher” responded with
either pity, anger, or no emotional reaction.
– Children whose teacher showed pity said they did
poorly because they’re just not good at puzzles,
and tended to think they would not do well in the
future.
Pity vs. Anger
• Sixth-graders were given impossible puzzles to
solve, and the “teacher” responded with
either pity, anger, or no emotional reaction.
– Children whose teacher showed pity said they did
poorly because they’re just not good at puzzles,
and tended to think they would not do well in the
future.
– Children whose teacher showed anger said they
did poorly because they didn’t try hard enough.
Praise vs. Blame
Praise vs. Blame
• 4-5yr olds and 11-12yr olds viewed a tape of
two boys completing easy tasks (solving math
problems or playing basketball)
• Success:
• Failure:
Praise vs. Blame
• 4-5yr olds and 11-12yr olds viewed a tape of
two boys completing easy tasks (solving math
problems or playing basketball)
• Success: One boy was praised (“Good job”)
and one received neutral feedback (“Correct”)
• Failure:
Praise vs. Blame
• 4-5yr olds and 11-12yr olds viewed a tape of
two boys completing easy tasks (solving math
problems or playing basketball)
• Success: One boy was praised (“Good job”)
and one received neutral feedback (“Correct”)
• Failure: One boy was criticized (“What’s the
matter with you? That’s not right”) and one
received neutral feedback (“No, not quite”)
Praise vs. Blame
• Children rated the boys’ math ability or
throwing ability on a 5-point scale
Praise vs. Blame
Saw boy
Saw boy
praised for criticized
success
for failure
4- to 5-yearHigher
Lower
olds
ability
ability
11- to 12Lower
Higher
year-olds
ability
ability
What does this tell us?
• As children get older, they become more likely
to interpret praise for easy success as an
indication of low ability
and blame for failure on an easy task as an
indication of high ability.
What does this tell us?
• As children get older, they become more likely
to interpret praise for easy success as an
indication of low ability
and blame for failure on an easy task as an
indication of high ability.
Younger children do not yet see high effort as
an indicator of low ability.
How does feedback like this affect
children’s motivation and sense of
self?
Teacher’s
attribution for
student’s
outcome
Student infers
attribution of
teacher
Pity vs. Anger
Praise vs. Blame
Help vs. Neglect
Self-ascription
to ability or
effort
Expectancy,
Esteem-related
affect,
Performance,
etc.
• 3-week unit on cursive writing in a 2nd-grade
classroom, with a new letter introduced each
day with time for students to practice writing
letters
• Two types of feedback for success:
– Praise (control) group: teacher gave a happy face
token and praise
– Attribution group: teacher gave a happy face
token and an explanation for their success
– Corrective feedback was given for unsuccessful
attempts
Outcome?
• Children in the “praise” only group were
disappointed and anxious
• Children in the “attribution” group enjoyed
cursive writing more, thought it was easier, and
used it more
• Students are eager for information that tells them
they are doing well AND for information that
affirms their sense of self-worth more generally
What kind of feedback do they need?
• To answer this question, we need to consider
Carol Dweck’s ideas about mindset.
– Growth mindset: incremental theory of
intelligence
– Fixed mindset: entity theory of intelligence
Do you mostly agree or mostly
disagree with each of these questions?
1. Your intelligence is something very basic
about you that you can’t change very much.
2. You can learn new things, but you can’t really
change how intelligent you are.
3. No matter how much intelligence you have,
you can always change it quite a bit.
Does understanding mindsets hold the
key?
• A student’s mindset is what we are changing
in the ways we respond to success and
failures.
– Person praise promotes a fixed mindset
– Process praise promotes a growth mindset
What about confidence?
• In one of Carol Dweck’s early studies, she gave
grade-school students deliberately confusing
material at the start of a new psychology unit.
What about confidence?
• In one of Carol Dweck’s early studies, she gave
grade-school students deliberately confusing
material at the start of a new psychology unit.
– For boys, the higher their IQ, the more likely they
would successfully learn the difficult material.
– For girls, the opposite was true. Girls with higher
IQs did even more poorly than girls with lower
IQs.
What about confidence?
• In one of Carol Dweck’s early studies, she gave
grade-school students deliberately confusing
material at the start of a new psychology unit.
– For boys, the higher their IQ, the more likely they
would successfully learn the difficult material.
– For girls, the opposite was true.
– Even though the girls were confident, their fixed
mindset caused them to give up easily.
Success training
• Dweck divided grade-schoolers who already
tended to respond to challenge with
helplessness into two groups.
– Success training group: 15 success trials in which
students completed difficult math problems
within a time limit
– Attribution retraining group: students were set
up to fail 2-3 of the 15 trials, and were told “You
should have tried harder.”
They then were successful on later tasks.
Comfort isn’t kind
• Instructors with an entity theory of math
ability (Rattan, Good, & Dweck, 2012)
– Assumptions based on a single low score
– More likely to comfort students, advise dropping
out of math classes, choose another major, assign
less homework
– Students interpreted kindness as indicator of low
expectations
Intervention studies
• Is it possible to teach students to adopt an
incremental, growth mindset rather than an
entity perspective, fixed mindset?
Intervention studies
• College students
– Brain functioning and potential malleability
– Wrote letters teaching this message to a struggling
middle school student
• Control group
– Different people have different intellectual
strengths
– Also wrote letters
• .23 increase in overall GPA
Intervention studies
• 7th-graders received weekly mentoring in
person and through email for one year
• Explained incremental theory of intelligence
• Higher math and verbal scores on statewide
achievement tests compared to students in
control group who received antidrug emails
– Especially girls in math
Intervention studies
• 7th-graders received 8 sessions of either
incremental theory and study skills
intervention or study skills intervention alone
– Math scores declined for students in study skills
group, as is common in transition to middle school
– Math scores did not decline during intervention
and increased afterward, .30 difference between
groups, back to where they started
– Learning study skills isn’t enough
Intervention studies
• Community college students received 8
sessions of incremental theory intervention
emphasizing malleability of adult brains:
“When people learn and practice new ways of
doing algebra or statistics, it can grow their
brains—even if they haven’t done well in math
in the past.”
A Formula for Growing Your Brain:
Effort+Good Strategies+Help From Others
“It’s not just about effort. You also need to learn
skills that let you use your brain in a smarter
way…You actually have to practice the right
way…to get better at something. In fact,
scientists have found that the brain grows more
when you learn something new, and less when
you practice things you already know.”
• Intervention delivered via Internet to more
than 200 community college students in
developmental math classes.
• Half received information about incremental
theory of intelligence, half only learned about
the brain; all wrote letters to future students.
• Intervention delivered via Internet to more
than 200 community college students in
developmental math classes.
• Half received information about incremental
theory of intelligence, half only learned about
the brain; all wrote letters to future students.
• Students in the intervention condition were
far more resilient months later.
What made the difference?
• The intervention changed the meaning of
challenge for the students. Instead of making
students feel “dumb,” the challenges offered a
way to get smarter.
The power of “yet”
• I can’t do it.
• I don’t know how.
• This doesn’t make sense.
The power of “yet”
• I can’t do it…yet.
• I don’t know how…yet.
• This doesn’t make sense…yet.
Two dangers
1. Blaming students
2. Trying to teach mindset as if it’s just another
worksheet
It’s not just magic words.
• Can it really be this simple? Yes, because it only
seems simple, but it’s not magic.
• Interventions that target mindset or other
psychological aspects of how students experience
get at just one small aspect of motivation
• This does not replace attention to how we teach,
what we teach
• Increasing students’ motivation to learn only
helps when learning opportunities exist
Thank you!
But wait…
• Once students have a growth mindset the
next step is not as simple as just telling them
to try harder
• Students need to know HOW to learn
effectively, and most don’t
• Effort alone is not enough
What comes next?
• Metacognition
– To learn effectively, students need to understand
how to learn.
– What does it mean to “study”?
Mistaken beliefs about learning
What doesn’t work:
• Highlighting
• Underlining
• Rereading or reviewing
previously learned material
• Memorization of facts
• Summarizing
What works:
• Practice tests for repeated
retrieval
• Distributed practice
• Interleaved practice
• Self-explanation
• Elaborative interrogation
Beliefs about stability
• Kidd, Palmeri, & Aslin, 2013
• Rational response to marshmallow task
• Interventions must be stealthy to be effective.
Growth mindset and the sense of self
• We’ve been talking about students’ thinking
about intelligence, but can the same
understanding be applied to students’
thinking about personality?
From Joël Franusic on the book "Art &
Fear" by David Bayles & Ted Orland
1
Mindsets and Motivation as the Keys to Academic Success
March 27, 2015
Karen Huxtable-Jester, Ph.D.
School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas
Email: drkarenhj@utdallas.edu, Twitter: @drkarenhj
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