I was reading a bit about Carol Dweck’s work on the influence of
students’ beliefs about intelligence in chapter seven of John Ragg’s The
learning paradigm college/ (2003). Ragg points out that she found
that if students believe that intelligence is fixed and unchangeable,
(what she calls an entity theory of intelligence) they will seek
affirmation through “easy, low-effort successes, and out performing
other students. Effort, difficulty, setbacks, or higher-performing peers
call their intelligence into question—even for those who have high
confidence in their intelligence”(cited by Tagg 2003, p. 53). On the
other hand beliefs that intelligence is incremental-changeable and
subject to improvement-will lead students when faced with failure to try
again and consider strategies for improvement. “Entering a challenging
scholastic setting with a belief in fixed intelligence seems to set
students up for self-doubt, anxiety, and drops in achievement” (p. 54).
As I read this I noticed that in thirty years of teaching at a very
selective liberal arts college, I have never had a conversation with a
colleague or student in which the idea that intelligence was changeable
came up. Next I realized that I had always taken for granted that
intelligence was an entity. I then checked my old reliable testing text,
/Psychological Testing /7^th edition by Anastasi and Urbina (1997). On
page 298 I find the quote, "Regardless of the magnitude of heritability
indexes found for IQs in various populations, one empirical fact is well
established: The IQ is not fixed and unchanging; and it is amenable to
modification by environmental interventions. On the next page she
writes, “Rises and drops in IQ may...result from both fortuitous
environmental changes occurring in a child’s life and planned
environmental interventions. Major changes in family structure, sharp
rises or drops in family income level, or adoption into a foster home
may produce conspicuous increases or decreases in IQ” (p.299).
Now I wondered if anyone on our list has developed or knows about a
presentation for faculty or students that presents the kinds of data and
studies that support this view along with Dweck's work? I’m especially
interested in down loadable graphs of any of the data for a possible
PowerPoint presentation on this topic? It seems to me that this kind of
presentation might be useful to all of us interested in having students
who were more interested in deep learning rather than more superficially
focused on looking smart.
Bob Grossman
Kalamazoo College
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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