Promoting students’ persistence in meeting challenges

published:  October 2007

Helping students to achieve their potential and motivating them to work hard to do so is an aim of central importance for most of us.

The study summarised in this Research for Teachers focuses on student motivation and achievement and explores how they relate to beliefs that students hold about themselves and about the nature of ability. The book, summarised in Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development, Dweck, C. (2000), Philadelphia, Taylor and Francis, aimed to explore why some young people exceed expectations and others fail to fulfil their potential.

Carol Dweck has spent over thirty years researching how learners responded to experiences of difficulty and challenge. She and her colleagues consistently found that, when pupils met difficulties and setbacks in their work, some responded by tackling the challenges with determination, whilst others quickly gave up. The two groups of students showed strikingly different ways of talking to themselves during a challenge. They also held different beliefs about the nature of ability or intelligence and the value of effort.

Dweck’s experiments explored:

·         the relationship between learners’ beliefs about the nature of intelligence and their behaviour on challenging tasks

·         whether learners’ beliefs about the nature of ability could be changed and the effect of changing such beliefs on their persistence in the face of difficulties

·         whether experiences of success increased learners’ desire for challenge and extended their ability to cope with setbacks

·         the possible roots of vulnerability in young children

·         the effects of different types of praise and criticism

·         the social effects of a belief in fixed traits.

 

Her work prompts and guides reflection on the value of practices such as offering praise for ability and achievement, or labelling students as having a particular level of ability. The findings also lend support to the use of teaching and learning initiatives that develop learners’ skills in their conscious use of problem-solving strategies, promote a shared understanding of quality during formative assessment and develop resilient attitudes amongst learners.