# FW: The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

**URL:** <http://discourse.iapct.org/t/fw-the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids/4248>\
**Category:** CSG2007\
**Created:** [December 2, 2007, 7:02pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/fw-the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids/4248 "2007-12-02T19:02:34Z")\
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**Author:** ![tedcloak](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/ba8739/32.png) [@tedcloak](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/tedcloak)\
**Post date:** [December 2, 2007, 7:02pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/fw-the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids/4248/1 "2007-12-02T19:02:34Z")

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The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Hint: Don't tell your kids that they are. More than  
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;three decades of research shows that a focus on  
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;effort-not on intelligence or ability-is key to  
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;success in school and in life

By Carol S. Dweck  
Scientific American  
\<[http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids](http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids)\>

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.

Others, meanwhile, focused on fixing errors and honing  
their skills. One advised himself: "I should slow down  
and try to figure this out." Two schoolchildren were  
particularly inspiring. One, in the wake of difficulty,  
pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked  
his lips and said, "I love a challenge!" The other, also  
confronting the hard problems, looked up at the  
experimenter and approvingly declared, "I was hoping  
this would be informative!" Predictably, the students  
with this attitude outperformed their cohorts in these  
studies.

Two Views of Intelligence

Several years later I developed a broader theory of what  
separates the two general classes of learners-helpless  
versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different  
types of students not only explain their failures  
differently, but they also hold different "theories" of  
intelligence. The helpless ones believe that  
intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain  
amount, and that's that. I call this a "fixed mind-set."  
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 and looking smart  
less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the  
belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think  
intelligence is malleable and can be developed through  
education and hard work. They want to learn above all  
else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your  
intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because  
slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they  
can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are  
energizing rather than intimidating; they offer  
opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth  
mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater  
academic success and were quite likely to outperform  
their counterparts.

We validated these expectations in a study published in  
early 2007. Psychologists Lisa Blackwell of Columbia  
University and Kali H. Trzes-niewski of Stanford  
University 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 stringent,  
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 we had predicted, the students with a growth mind-set  
felt that learning was a more important goal in school  
than getting good grades. In addition, they held hard  
work in high regard, believing that the more you labored  
at something, the better you would become at it. They  
understood that even geniuses have to work hard for  
their great accomplishments. 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 for mastering the material.

The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were  
concerned about looking smart with little regard for  
learning. They had negative views of effort, believing  
that having to work hard at something 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 divergent 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.

Along with Columbia psychologist Heidi Grant, I found a  
similar relation between mind-set and achievement in a  
2003 study of 128 Columbia freshman premed students who  
were enrolled in a challenging general chemistry course.  
Although all the students cared about grades, the ones  
who earned the best grades were those who placed a high  
premium on learning rather than on showing that they  
were smart in chemistry. The focus on learning  
strategies, effort and persistence paid off for these  
students.

Confronting Deficiencies

A belief in fixed intelligence also makes people less  
willing to admit to errors or to confront and remedy  
their deficiencies in school, at work and in their  
social relationships. In a study published in 1999 of  
168 freshmen entering the University of Hong Kong, where  
all instruction and coursework are in English, three  
Hong Kong colleagues and I found that students with a  
growth mind-set who scored poorly on their English  
proficiency exam were far more inclined to take a  
remedial English course than were low-scoring students  
with a fixed mind-set. The students with a stagnant view  
of intelligence were presumably unwilling to admit to  
their deficit and thus passed up the opportunity to  
correct it.

A fixed mind-set can similarly hamper communication and  
progress in the workplace by leading managers and  
employees to discourage or ignore constructive criticism  
and advice. Research by psychologists Peter Heslin and  
Don VandeWalle of Southern Methodist University and Gary  
Latham of the University of Toronto 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. Presumably, managers with a  
growth mind-set see themselves as works-in-progress and  
understand that they need feedback to improve, whereas  
bosses with a fixed mind-set are more likely to see  
criticism as reflecting their underlying level of  
competence. Assuming that other people are not capable  
of changing either, executives with a fixed mind-set are  
also less likely to mentor their underlings. But after  
Heslin, VandeWalle and Latham gave managers a tutorial  
on the value and principles of the growth mind-set,  
supervisors became more willing to coach their employees  
and gave more useful advice.

Mind-set can affect the quality and longevity of  
personal relationships as well, through people's  
willingness-or unwillingness-to deal with difficulties.  
Those with a fixed mind-set are less likely than those  
with a growth mind-set to broach problems in their  
relationships and to try to solve them, according to a  
2006 study I conducted with psychologist Lara Kammrath  
of Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. After all, if  
you think that human personality traits are more or less  
fixed, relationship repair seems largely futile.  
Individuals who believe people can change and grow,  
however, are more confident that confronting concerns in  
their relationships will lead to resolutions.

Proper Praise

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 math  
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 engenders a growth mind-set, our studies  
have shown. People also communicate mind-sets through  
praise. Although many, if not most, parents believe that  
they should build up a child by telling him or her how  
brilliant and talented he or she is, our research  
suggests that this is misguided.

In studies involving several hundred fifth graders  
published in 1998, for example, Columbia psychologist  
Claudia M. Mueller and I gave children questions from a  
nonverbal IQ test. After the first 10 problems, on which  
most children did fairly well, we praised them. We  
praised some of them for their intelligence: "Wow .  
that's a really good score. You must be smart at this."  
We commended others for their effort: "Wow . that's a  
really good score. You must have worked really hard."

We found that intelligence praise encouraged a fixed  
mind-set more often than did pats on the back for  
effort. Those congratulated for their intelligence, for  
example, shied away from a challenging assignment-they  
wanted an easy one instead-far more often than the kids  
applauded for their effort. (Most of those lauded for  
their hard work wanted the difficult problem set from  
which they would learn.) When we gave everyone hard  
problems anyway, those praised for being smart became  
discouraged, doubting their ability. And their scores,  
even on an easier problem set we gave them afterward,  
declined as compared with their previous results on  
equivalent problems. In contrast, students praised for  
their effort did not lose confidence when faced with the  
harder questions, and their performance improved  
markedly on the easier problems that followed.

Making Up Your Mind-set

In addition to encouraging a growth mind-set through  
praise for effort, parents and teachers can help  
children by providing explicit instruction regarding the  
mind as a learning machine. Blackwell, Trzesniewski and  
I recently 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 neurons  
in the brain to grow new connections. From such  
instruction, many students began to see themselves as  
agents of their own brain development. Students who had  
been disruptive or bored sat still and took note. One  
particularly unruly boy looked up during the discussion  
and said, "You mean I don't have to be dumb?"

As the semester progressed, the math grades of the kids  
who learned only study skills continued to decline,  
whereas those of the students given the growth-mind-set  
training stopped falling and began to bounce back to  
their former levels. Despite being unaware that there  
were two types of instruction, teachers reported  
noticing significant motivational changes in 27 percent  
of the children in the growth mind-set workshop as  
compared with only 9 percent of students in the control  
group. One teacher wrote: "Your workshop has already had  
an effect. L [our unruly male student], who never puts  
in any extra effort and often doesn't turn in homework  
on time, actually stayed up late to finish an assignment  
early so I could review it and give him a chance to  
revise it. He earned a B+. (He had been getting Cs and  
lower.)"

Other researchers have replicated our results.  
Psychologists Catherine Good, then at Columbia, and  
Joshua Aronson and Michael Inzlicht of New York  
University reported in 2003 that a growth mind-set  
workshop raised the math and English achievement test  
scores of seventh graders. In a 2002 study Aronson, Good  
(then a graduate student at the University of Texas at  
Austin) and their colleagues found that college students  
began to enjoy their schoolwork more, value it more  
highly and get better grades as a result of training  
that fostered a growth mind-set.

We have now encapsulated such instruction in an  
interactive computer program called "Brain-ology," which  
should be more widely available by mid-2008. Its six  
modules teach students about the brain-what it does and  
how to make it work better. In a virtual brain lab,  
users can click on brain regions to determine their  
functions or on nerve endings to see how connections  
form when people learn. Users can also advise virtual  
students with problems as a way of practicing how to  
handle schoolwork difficulties; additionally, users keep  
an online journal of their study practices.

New York City seventh graders who tested a pilot version  
of Brainology told us that the program had changed their  
view of learning and how to promote it. One wrote: "My  
favorite thing from Brainology is the neurons part where  
when u [sic] learn something there are connections and  
they keep growing. I always picture them when I'm in  
school." A teacher said of the students who used the  
program: "They offer to practice, study, take notes, or  
pay attention to ensure that connections will be made."

Teaching children such information is not just a ploy to  
get them to study. People do differ in intelligence,  
talent and ability. And yet research is converging on  
the conclusion that great accomplishment, and even what  
we call genius, is typically the result of years of  
passion and dedication and not something that flows  
naturally from a gift. Mozart, Edison, Curie, Darwin and  
Cézanne were not simply born with talent; they  
cultivated it through tremendous and sustained effort.  
Similarly, hard work and discipline contribute much more  
to school achievement than IQ does.

Such lessons apply to almost every human endeavor. For  
instance, many young athletes value talent more than  
hard work and have consequently become unteachable.  
Similarly, many people accomplish little in their jobs  
without constant praise and encouragement to maintain  
their motivation. If we foster a growth mind-set in our  
homes and schools, however, we will give our children  
the tools to succeed in their pursuits and to become  
responsible employees and citizens.

> **···**
>
> -----Original Message-----  
> From: [moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG](mailto:moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG) [[mailto:moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG](mailto:moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG)]  
> Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 7:11 PM  
> To: [PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG](mailto:PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG)  
> Subject: The Secret to Raising Smart Kids
> 
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**Author:** ![rsmarken](http://discourse.iapct.org/user_avatar/discourse.iapct.org/rsmarken/32/3553_2.png) [@rsmarken](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/rsmarken)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 2007, 3:33am UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/fw-the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids/4248/2 "2007-12-03T03:33:14Z")

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[From Rick Marken (2007.12.02.1930)]

What in the world does this have to do with PCT, Ted?

Best

Rick

> **···**
>
> On Dec 2, 2007 11:02 AM, Ted Cloak \<tcloak@unm.edu\> wrote:
> 
> > -----Original Message-----  
> > From: moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG [mailto:moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG]  
> > Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 7:11 PM  
> > To: PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG  
> > Subject: The Secret to Raising Smart Kids
> > 
> > The Secret to Raising Smart Kids
> 
> --  
> Richard S. Marken PhD  
> rsmarken@gmail.com