Individual Differences - Educational Attainment/fixed mindset/growth mindset lecture notes

Module: Individual Differences


Week 11 lecture – Individual Differences and Educational Attainment


Lecture outline
Discuss some of the implications of individual differences in educational settings,
looking at how individual differences could relate to education attainment.

Focusing on three aspects of Individual differences:
 Intelligence
 Mindset
 Personality traits

We will have a look at some empirical studies to see how these factors could affect
educational attainment.


Reading:
Dweck – read the first 14 pages in chapter 3 using Google Books which are the most
relevant pages for this lecture.


Part I: Intelligence and educational attainment
 Intelligence has been found to be associated with many kinds of life outcomes
such as wealth, performance and health.
 We are going to see how intelligence affects education attainment.
 Numerous studies have found that intelligence has a moderate to strong
correlation with educational attainment.
 The table on the slide gives us a brief idea about how we can interpret the
strength of correlation from statistical numbers.


Deary, Strand, Smith and Fernandes (2007)
The correlation between intelligence and educational attainment has been tested in
different studies.


Deary et al (2007)
 This test is the most widely used test of reasoning abilities in the UK.
 The test measures three types of abilities: verbal reasoning, quantitative
reasoning and non-verbal reasoning.

,  In the vocabulary test, children would be asked to choose a similar name from
a list of 5 possibilities.
 Children’s scores on their GCSEs and the GNVQs were used.
 Intelligence scores strongly predicts educational attainment.


Part II: Mindset and educational attainment
 There is an alternative theory that asserts that a crucial cause of educational
attainment is one’s belief about intelligence.
 People’s belief about the nature of human attributes such as intelligence or
personality are defined as mindset. The theory was purposed by Professor
Dweck at Stanford University. She proposed that there are two mindset types:
fixed mindset and growth mindset.


Why mindset works?
Different mindset beliefs leads people to achieve:
 Different achievement goals
 Attitudes to failure
 Attribution styles
 Resilience to failure
These differences can explain why people perform differently in tasks.

For example, people with a fixed mindset focus on the state of their competence.
They are more likely to pursue a performance goal rather than a learning goal. If
their performance is good, that means they are smart. But if they feel they are
learning something new, that will make them look dumb.


Fixed Mindset
 People with a fixed mindset will attribute their failure to a lack of ability and
believe the amount of effort into a task matters. Therefore, avoids negative
judgements about their competence. They view a focus on and pursue the
goal of achieving superior performance.
 They prefer to work on easy tasks rather than difficult tasks. So if these
people encounter a challenging task, they often give up immediately.


Growth Mindset
 They are not concerned about the state of their competence and would rather
focus on developing and acquiring of that competence.
 They are more likely to pursue a learning goal rather than a performance goal.
 If their performance is good, they feel that they have worked hard and have
taken the appropriate strategy.