Hope boosts educational achievement

A new study at Stanford, recently reported in Child Development, shows that if kids know that intelligence can be developed, they do better in school than kids who think it’s fixed at a certain level.
NPR recently reported on a study by researcher Carol Dweck in which “about 100 seventh graders, all doing poorly in math, were randomly assigned to workshops on good study skills. One workshop gave lessons on how to study well. The other taught about the expanding nature of intelligence and the brain.
The students in the latter group ‘learned that the brain actually forms new connections every time you learn something new, and that over time, this makes you smarter.’
By the end of the semester, the group of kids who had been taught that the brain can grow smarter had significantly better math grades than the other group.”
(This is one reason kids from the US don’t do so well in international comparisons. Our culture tells people they either “have it” or they don’t. And some are given the message that people in their ethnic group don’t have it, academically. In other cultures kids are more likely to think success comes from hard work. )
To read the full NPR report, go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7406521