Believing ability is malleable is claimed to improve persistence and achievement.
Dweck's construct. The replication picture is unflattering: meta-analytic effect sizes on achievement are small, and the large-scale interventions have mostly disappointed.
In practice
- A school replaces "you're clever" with "you worked hard" in every classroom, and the next year's results are indistinguishable from the last.
- A pupil who believed the subject was not for him attempts the harder paper; the pupil already attempting it gains nothing from being told the same thing.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation offered is attribution: a pupil who treats ability as fixed reads failure as a verdict and withdraws, while one who treats it as malleable reads failure as information and persists.
- In its favour
- The attributional mechanism is real and has support in the older literature on learned helplessness, and the construct drew useful attention to how failure is interpreted.
- Against it
- Meta-analytic effects on achievement are small, several large-scale interventions have disappointed, and the effects that remain are concentrated among lower-attaining pupils rather than general.
- Standing
- Replication effect sizes are small; the intervention literature is contested.
- Subject
- Learning & Education
- Essay
- Theories of teaching, and what schools are for