The New York Times has a GREAT article about efforts to increase student retention at UT Austin among first generation students. Worth a read. I’m just going to pick out one idea in the article this morning. It’s about the psychology of failure and success.
Students who believe that they don’t belong with the group and believe that intelligence is a fixed entity have a very difficult time in school, particular in transition periods. They feel too helpless to pull themselves up the first time that they get a bad grade in college.
Leading researchers like Carol Dweck, Claude Steele and Hazel Markus were using experimental methods to delve into the experience of students from early childhood all the way through college. To the extent that the Stanford researchers shared a unifying vision, it was the belief that students were often blocked from living up to their potential by the presence of certain fears and anxieties and doubts about their ability. These feelings were especially virulent at moments of educational transition — like the freshman year of high school or the freshman year of college. And they seemed to be particularly debilitating among members of groups that felt themselves to be under some special threat or scrutiny: women in engineering programs, first-generation college students, African-Americans in the Ivy League.
The negative thoughts took different forms in each individual, of course, but they mostly gathered around two ideas. One set of thoughts was aboutbelonging. Students in transition often experienced profound doubts about whether they really belonged — or could ever belong — in their new institution. The other was connected to ability. Many students believed in what Carol Dweck had named an entity theory of intelligence — that intelligence was a fixed quality that was impossible to improve through practice or study. And so when they experienced cues that might suggest that they weren’t smart or academically able — a bad grade on a test, for instance — they would often interpret those as a sign that they could never succeed. Doubts about belonging and doubts about ability often fed on each other, and together they created a sense of helplessness. That helplessness dissuaded students from taking any steps to change things. Why study if I can’t get smarter? Why go out and meet new friends if no one will want to talk to me anyway? Before long, the nagging doubts became self-fulfilling prophecies.
Apt. 11d 
Dweck’s original papers are a fascinating read (Dweck & Leggett, 1988) — but, the issue in the work that I’ve read is that the definition of “entity theory of intelligence” (or, more specifically those who hold it is) is not well defined. But, if you think of correlations between one set of behaviors compatible with “entity intelligence” and others, it’s a fascinating set of results. For example, “entity intelligence children” (and, in the older set of papers, she refers to this characteristic as though it was a characteristic of the child, and not the interventions), give up when confronted with a pamphlet that contains garbled/unreadable text, while the other children struggle through, and get to the easier readable passages. Entity children ask for comparisons to other children (when offered the choice of whether to compare or to get hints on how to do the work better). And, disturbingly, they are more likely to lie about their performance (i.e. the number of questions they got right).
The recent resurgence of interest in Dweck’s work stems, I think, from the idea that you can teach children not to hold “entity theories” but hold “incremental” theories (also called intrinsic/mastery, and originally, she called the first group “helpless”) (Kamins and Dweck, 1999). I’m not sure how malleable this personality trait might be (as with the marshmallow test, and theories of grit).
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What a timely post. My daughter is having her first official day of high school today. She was nervous, so we went for a walk in the park where we had a discussion on opportunities, test scores, IQ, multiple intelligences, classism, and not living down to the low expectations of others.
She wasn’t worried about the other kids. She’s worried about the teachers. Teachers are gatekeepers for one’s opportunities in the future, and she’s already run into a few who’ve discouraged her from having college dreams/”setting your sights too high”.
Meanwhile, I still think I deserve a gold medal for not strangling the bitch who stage-whispered to her colleague “that’s a big word” when I used the term “pathologize” at an IEP meeting. (I called her out on it.)
Yeah, education looks a lot different from the working class.
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