Lec 011
Little genius conclusion
- The little girl is now doing well, but because her parents really pushed her into the mastery aspect and she learned to be more relaxed about her capacities
Little genius story
- 25 years ago, a friend invited his wife over on a sunday night and he had a 6 year old daughter, first time going to their house - When they arrived, his friend wasn't there and was busy with their daughter → the 6 year old girl had been quite sick all weekend and her parents had told her she wouldn't be able to go to school and the girl freaked out: she liked school so much because the teacher identified the 5 best students and she calls them her little geniuses and she has special activities for this group to accelerate their math progress, she finally said that she didn't go to school because "she didn't want to get the little geniuses sick" - The parents were uncomfortable with the labelling: some kids were being told they were the special ones and the question is: what would be the motivational impact?
Dweck and math
- Dweck has focused on changing kid's beliefs by doing interventions → she did this with math performance at first: many kids have a problem when going from 6th grade to 7th grade and you can see that kids fall dramatically - She designed an intervention: she had 100 students doing poorly in math were targeted for study skills intervention and they were put in 2 groups: - One group learned about how the brain works and that intelligence can grow + the traditional study skills: they got higher math grades in the end: if you can conive kids their intelligence is malleable and not fixed they will be more resilient and will get better grades - Another group was taught how to do maths better: traditional study skills
East VS West
- Dweck's work suggests there are east & west differences: she thinks that something unusual has happened in china/ japan and korea: there is a focus on ability becoming malleable (which is good) but there is an incredible pressure on performance goal focus (and not on mastery) so whether you do well is based on how hard you are working so you have to show you are amazing - She thinks it's a distorted merging of malleable beliefs and performance (rather than mastery oriented goals)
praise
- It's very common to praise kids or identify kids for being talented, Carol Dweck did surveys and 85% of parents think it's a good idea to praise their children for their abilities (they think if you praise a child, that will make them more motivated to work in that area and become even better: this is a naive theory)
Prof self-portrait
- Koestner self portraits: he tried a self-portrait and his daughter did a self portrait and she took classes so she knows how to do it: she had exposure, training & practice
Dweck would say that there are 3 theories in psyc that support this praise
- Self-efficacy: when adults feel a sense of self-efficacy they give more effort and they persist so it suggests praise is good, sports psychologists think it's helpful for athletes to think they have a gift - Expectancy theory: if you create a positive expectancy there is a general phenomenon where people will behave to make that expectation come true (study where teachers were told that 50% children would blossom and this was random but it turns out that these children did do better) - Reinforcement theory: praise has been thought of as a social reinforcer
Mueller & Dweck in 1998 show and tell
- Then she also asked: I can tell you how your friends did (people in the intelligent situation only cared about this) or new strategies to do better (people in the ability only cared about this) - People in the intelligent situation also exaggerated how good their score was when talking to people
Mueller & Dweck in 1998 enjoyment & continuing
- Then the children were given another set of 10 problems, they were very hard and on average they would only get 3 out of 10 and they were all told they got 3/10 - After the failure, all the kids were asked how much they enjoyed it and if they wanted to continue to do this experiment: the kids praised for ability are the least likely to enjoy the task and to want to continue it - When they are asked why they failed: the kids who were praised for their ability they blame their ability so that they say "I'm not smart enough" → kids are being set up to blame their lack of ability for their failures VS kids who failed with effort blamed their effort
Measuring your own implicit theory
- Which of the 2 statements do you agree with more strongly? • Your intelligence is something you cannot change very much • You can change your intelligence quite a bit - US and Canadians endorse the options 50-50 Most asian groups endorse the first option about 20% of the time: they are much less likely to see it as fixed and not changeable - You can do this for any ability
Connection between Dweck and Ericsson
- a lot of people are skeptical of Ericsson's conclusion because he argues that many of the things we believe are due to innate talent are actually not due to that - Prof isn't sure if ability is 10% of 20% but Dweck's research suggests that it is much more adaptive to believe he is right
Betty Edwards
- art teacher where you do 35 hours in a week and people often cannot draw and this is the difference in the self portrait from monday morning and friday afternoon and the progression is amazing
Prof chem example
- freshman at Columbia and she was doing research with chemistry students (they are often pre-med) - He got 100% on the test and then 48% so he dropped out the course but Dweck says that is not the adaptive way to do well at school
Dweck
- has a theory that your mindset about your abilities is the most important predictor at handling the challenge of developing your abilities
Genetics and Ericson's view:
- intense and sustained training activity can produce biochemical side products that trigger the activation of dormant genes - healthy children appear to have the prerequisite genes but few engage in the type, intensity and duration of required practice that would achieve the desired adaptation - Prof is hoping that we agree with the fact that your abilities are malleable, growable and adaptable
Most common question for Dweck
- isn't it naive to believe that everyone has the potential to change? Ie: some people just cannot draw well - Many of us decide that we cannot some things but Dweck says: She loves the word "yet" which says that this is a skill acquired over time and there is a learning curve
Mueller & Dweck in 1998
- paper that described results from 6 studies so everything was replicated multiple times - 128 fifth grader from rural and inner city schools: very representative sample and they would work on 3 sets of raven's progressive matrices (non verbal intelligence test to figure out patterns and you don't know whether you do well or not) - Kids would first do moderately challenging matrices and then more difficult ones and then they would go back to the moderately difficult - In the first 10, no matter their actual score they were told they had 80% of the problems right - After the 1st set of problem they received random feedback to 1 of 3 conditions: You must be smart/ You must have worked hard/ No evaluation or additional feedback
Mueller & Dweck in 1998 bottom line results
- performance on the 3rd set of problems which matched the level of difficult as the original set was then measured: - Control praise kids are pretty standard abd do about the same - Kids receive intelligent praise do much work the 2nd time and do a full point worse in every study - consistent pattern of more failure - Kids praised for their effort - even though they experience failure they come back and do better when given the 3rd trial: they benefit from the failure experiment Dweck suggests its very dangerous to highlight ability as the reason that the kids are doing well - Dweck says that whether you think intelligence is malleable or fixed is very interested: if you think it's fixed when you face challenges you won't be able to respond adaptively
Mueller & Dweck in 1998 easy vs hard
- she asked after the experiment is over, we'll be able to give you more puzzles to work on of 2 kinds: either you can do easy puzzles and do well and show what you know or puzzles that are hard but you will learn a lot from them - This is who chose the easiest goal (you will do well) → the kids having received intelligence praised were much more likely to choose these, kids in the control condition were in the middle and kids praised in their efforts were more likely to choose the tough ones where they would do better
JUMP
- stands for Junior Unidentified Math Prodigy - A new way of teaching math: canadian math philosopher called John Matten developed materials and methods to teach kids to approach math in a growth oriented ways: one of the saddest things about our educational system is that most of us are not good at maths: He wrote a book called "the myth of ability" - instead of singling out the 5 who happened to be higher, they start with the assumption that everyone is good at maths and some people just need feedback, microsteps and sharing of strategies to bring that out - "We force a choice on them: to decide that either they're dumb or math is dumb" - "The foundation of the process is building confidence" - Results: in the JUMP classes instead of having a wide distribution it seems like the whole class is doing better
Dweck & prof
- used this in her article to show how people have misunderstood the longer term effects of giving ability praise - she said these were studies that were not realistic because in real life there are always challenges so if you want to study the effect of praise you need to have varying conditions and your paradigm needs failure - Also she said that you can't just look at short ter, effect but the long term effects → quite often there are things we do that get kids excited but they only work in the short term but the long term consequences are often opposite - Telling kids they succeed because of their ability is setting them up to be helpless when they actually encounter failure
prof's gut instinct
- was that praise is good for children: prof had children & uni studnets do some hidden figure puzzles that were challenging and couldn't be sure how many you had correct so he gave them feedback + praise ("you got 8 out of 10") and then he added a statement that focused on ability (you have a knack for this) or on effort (you work hard, you applied yourself) - Both children and uni student worked better to the ability praise He was focused on intrinsic motivation (where people continue on a task even though it's not longer required)
difference between performance feedback and evaluation
- we need performance feedback to advance and develop but there is controversy as to whether evaluation is needed or not
What will the impact on motivation be? (little genius)
- you can see if the kids are mastery oriented: do they give a lot of effort ? What kind of goals they set? Do they seek or avoid challenged? When they are faced with challenge, how resilient are they? ALso: how persistent are they in their goal? - There is going to be a negative impact on the kids that are not the geniuses → the non-geniuses will probably not give in as much effort and will set goals that are easy, they probably won't set themselves high challenge - There is a danger to this approach for actually both groups: geniuses and non-geniuses
Dweck conclusion
- you should see if children seek challenged, if they are resilient in obstance, if they give effort and if they had a strategy → she says this is the key to growing and develop our abilities, a sense of mastery - When we are praised for our abilities, we develop a sense of fixedness which doesn't make your likely to pursue challenged because you want to show that you have this special ability and it changed your motivation entirely
