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ScientificAmerican.com > Scientific American Mind > Mind & Brain > How Things Work


From the December 2007 Scientific American Mind | 93 comments
The Secret to Raising Smart Kids
Hint: Don't tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life

By Carol S. Dweck


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Key Concepts

Growing Pains
Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.

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December
2007 Issue
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Key Concepts

Growing Pains
Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.

More from this issue of Mind
December
2007 Issue
Head Lines
Shoot First, Ace Geometry Later
Head Lines
Left Brains vs. Right Brains
Facts and Fictions in Mental Health
What "Psychopath" Means
Buy the Digital Edition


A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son’s confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.

Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.

The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

Praising children’s innate abilities, as Jonathan’s parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.

The Opportunity of Defeat
I first began to investigate the underpinnings of human motivation—and how people persevere after setbacks—as a psychology graduate student at Yale University in the 1960s. Animal experiments by psychologists Martin Seligman, Steven Maier and Richard Solomon of the University of Pennsylvania had shown that after repeated failures, most animals conclude that a situation is hopeless and beyond their control. After such an experience, the researchers found, an animal often remains passive even when it can affect change—a state they called learned helplessness.

People can learn to be helpless, too, but not everyone reacts to setbacks this way. I wondered: Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people’s beliefs about why they had failed.

In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. In 1972, when I taught a group of elementary and middle school children who displayed helpless behavior in school that a lack of effort (rather than lack of ability) led to their mistakes on math problems, the kids learned to keep trying when the problems got tough. They also solved many of the problems even in the face of difficulty. Another group of helpless children who were simply rewarded for their success on easy problems did not improve their ability to solve hard math problems. These experiments were an early indication that a focus on effort can help resolve helplessness and engender success.

Subsequent studies revealed that the most persistent students do not ruminate about their own failure much at all but instead think of mistakes as problems to be solved. At the University of Illinois in the 1970s I, along with my then graduate student Carol Diener, asked 60 fifth graders to think out loud while they solved very difficult pattern-recognition problems. Some students reacted defensively to mistakes, denigrating their skills with comments such as “I never did have a good rememory,” and their problem-solving strategies deteriorated.


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wd60152 at 05:32 PM on 11/29/07
Does anyone have a reference to the article "You Can Grow Your Brain" which was mentioned in this report?
Reply | Report Abuse


mfidelman at 09:43 PM on 11/29/07
I wonder if the same lessons apply to kids with learning disabilities. I.e., do kids who believe that their disability can be overcome by hard work do better than those who believe they're limited by their disability?
Reply | Report Abuse


A Future Scientist at 12:26 AM on 11/30/07
This article says what to "believe" regarding intelligence. What I want to know is what the truth is. Is intelligence innate, learned, or a little bit of both?
Reply | Report Abuse


Singing at 06:33 AM on 11/30/07
It is a very article. I am couraged. I ,an old student, is preparing test in order to apply the school.
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SDSquirrel at 08:22 AM on 11/30/07
Well, it all seems to me to be about building resilience. So, IMHO, the next step is to encourage our educators to work with their students on tasks which foster creativity and ingenuity rather than just tasks which have a correct or incorrect answer. A willingness to work (effort), a love of learning (passion), and a desire to try things from different angles (ingenuity) - imagine a whole generation like that!
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gs_chandy at 02:39 PM on 11/30/07
Excellent article!
I wanted to attach a PowerPoint file that would present information about some useful tools that could provide significant confirmation of the author's thesis - that talents can be developed and 'grown', given attititudes that enable learning (and 'unlearning' of unproductive attitudes and behaviours).

[Alas, I am informed that this kind of file is not allowed as as attachment, What to do?]
--- GSC
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ganeshbrhills at 03:16 PM on 11/30/07
Very useful article, especially for young parents. I wish to compliment the author, Carol.

Ganesh
B.R.HILLS, |South India
Reply | Report Abuse


kravisankar at 06:53 PM on 12/01/07
Thanks a lot for an interesting and useful article. Very happy to be convinced that this conclusion comes from such a rigorous and methodical research study.

Ravi K., South India
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AndrewBurkhart at 05:56 AM on 12/02/07
I'm concerned this article is missing the point: The goal of the studies should show HOW mind set affects the brain, and how and why this translates into better performance, NOT how mindset translates to better perfomance.

For exmaple, do beliefs entail unconcious visualizations that prime the pre-motor cortex... thus improving the abilitie of the student when doing homework?

I think our knowledge of how effort affects performance is superficial at best.

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Edited by AndrewBurkhart at 12/01/2007 10:16 PM

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Edited by AndrewBurkhart at 12/01/2007 10:22 PM
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AndrewBurkhart at 05:56 AM on 12/02/07
repost

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Edited by AndrewBurkhart at 12/01/2007 10:09 PM
Reply | Report Abuse


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