The Secret to Raising Smart Kids
I first began to investigate the basis of human motivation—and how people persevere after setbacks—as a psychology graduate student at Yale University in the 1960s. Animal experiments by psychologists at 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 an animal often remains passive even when it can effect change—a state they called learned helplessness.
People can learn to be helpless, too. 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. When I told a group of school children who displayed helpless behavior that a lack of effort led to their mistakes in math, they learned to keep trying when the problems got tough. Another group of helpless children who were simply rewarded for their success on easier problems did not improve their ability to solve hard math problems. These experiments indicated that a focus on effort can help resolve helplessness and generate success.
Later, I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different "theories" of intelligence. The helpless ones believe intelligence is a fixed characteristic: you have only a certain amount, and that's that. I call this a "fixed mind-set(思维模式)." Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely. The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is not fixed and can be developed through education and hard work. Such children believe challenges are energizing rather than intimidating(令人生畏); they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set were destined(注定) for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.
We validated these expectations in a study in which two other psychologists and I monitored 373 students for two years during the transition to junior high school, when the work gets more difficult and the grading more strict, to determine how their mind-sets might affect their math grades. At the beginning of seventh grade, we assessed the students' mind-sets by asking them to agree or disagree with statements such as "Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can't really change." We then assessed their beliefs about other aspects of learning and looked to see what happened to their grades.
As predicted, the students with a growth mind-set felt that learning was a more important goal than getting good grades. In addition, they held hard work in high regard. They understood that even geniuses have to work hard. Confronted by a setback such as a disappointing test grade, students with a growth mind-set said they would study harder or try a different strategy. The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with less regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard was a sign of low ability. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence did not need to work hard to do well. Attributing a bad grade to their own lack of ability, those with a fixed mind-set said that they would study less in the future, try never to take that subject again and consider cheating on future tests.
Such different outlooks had a dramatic impact on performance. At the start of junior high, the math achievement test scores of the students with a growth mind-set were comparable to those of students who displayed a fixed mind-set. But as the work became more difficult, the students with a growth mind-set showed greater persistence. As a result, their math grades overtook those of the other students by the end of the first semester—and the gap between the two groups continued to widen during the two years we followed them.
A fixed mind-set can also hinder communication and progress in the workplace and discourage or ignore constructive criticism and advice. Research shows that managers who have a fixed mind-set are less likely to seek or welcome feedback from their employees than are managers with a growth mind-set.
How do we transmit a growth mind-set to our children? One way is by telling stories about achievements that result from hard work. For instance, talking about mathematical geniuses who were more or less born that way puts students in a fixed mind-set, but descriptions of great mathematicians who fell in love with math and developed amazing skills produce a growth mind-set.
In addition, parents and teachers can help children by providing explicit instruction regarding the mind as a learning machine. I designed an eight-session workshop for 91 students whose math grades were declining in their first year of junior high. Forty-eight of the students received instruction in study skills only, whereas the others attended a combination of study skills sessions and classes in which they learned about the growth mind-set and how to apply it to schoolwork. In the growth mind-set classes, students read and discussed an article entitled "You Can Grow Your Brain." They were taught that the brain is like a muscle that gets stronger with use and that learning prompts the brain to grow new connections. From such instruction, many students began to see themselves as agents of their own brain development. Despite being unaware that there were two types of instruction, teachers reported significant motivational changes in 27% of the children in the growth mind-set workshop as compared with only 9% of students in the control group.
Research is converging(汇聚) on the conclusion that great accomplishment and even genius are typically the result of years of passion and dedication and not something that flows naturally from a gift.