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Carol S. Dweck Summary

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About the Author

Carol S. Dweck, age 70, graduated from Barnard College in 1967. She then received her Ph.D. in Psychology at Yale University in 1972. Dweck held positions at Columbia, Harvard and the University of Illinois before she accepted her current position as the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University in 2004. She currently teaches teaches courses in social development and motivation. Most of Dweck’s leading research focuses on personality, development, and motivation. Her book Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development was named Book of the Year by the World Education Federation.

Contents of Book

Mindset was written by Dweck to teach the reader how they can reach …show more content…

Dweck was studying how people cope with failures by watching how students deal with hard problems, in this situation, puzzles. The first ones given to the students were fairly easy but the next ones were hard. As she observed how the students coped with the challenges she saw something that really surprised her. Dweck describes how one ten-year-old boy, when presented with the hard puzzles, pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together and cried out, “I love a challenge!” Another student looked up with a pleased expression and said, “You know, I was hoping this would be informative!” Dweck was shocked by their reactions, she had always thought one either coped with initial failure or didn’t. She never thought anyone would be so excited about it. Dweck was so inspired by these children that she needed to dig deeper. Previous to this experiment she thought people were either smart or you weren’t, failure meant you weren’t. These children proved to her that this wasn’t the case, they proved intellectual skills could be improved through effort. They weren’t discouraged by failure, they didn't even think they were failing. This section of Mindset made me think of the chapter nine topic, The Achievement

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