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How Failure Can Impact A Children's View On Intelligence

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Parents and Education: How Failure Can Impact a Children’s View on Intelligence

There are a lot of factors that play a role in how a child performs in the educational realm. A major influencer is the role that a parent plays in their child’s education specifically how the parent views failure. In this article, Parents’ Views of Failure Predict Children’s Fixed and Growth Intelligence Mind-Sets by Kyla Haimovitz and Carol S. Dweck, the question is if a parent’s specific response to failure impacts the child’s belief in whether intelligence is malleable or fixed. The article cites research done on multiple experiments that study: the level of a child’s motivation and learning based on talent, student’s belief in the “malleability of intelligence” …show more content…

The experiment consisted of five separate studies. I chose to cite only three which were Study 1, 3a, and 3b. For clarification, the study documents two approaches to failure: Failure Enhancing and Failure Debilitating. Failure Enhancing is the mindset that failure is something positive and can teach valuable lessons to help improve upon while Failure Debilitating is the mindset that failure is negative and inhibits actual learning. The paper also documents two approaches to Intelligence: Fixed vs. Growth. A fixed mindset is the belief that intelligence is innate and cannot be further improved past a certain point. A growth …show more content…

The study gathered 100 participants that were in 4th-5th grade, an average age of 11, and over half female. The participant location was three schools in the San Francisco Area. Parental consent was given. The questionnaire used to measure the intelligence mindset was identical to the one used in Study One. They also measured the children’s view of how their parent’s perceived failure by a two question survey: “my parents think failure can help me learn” and “my parents think failure is bad and should be avoided (Haimovitz and Dweck 2016).” The results of the study were that the reports done by the children on their parent’s failure mindset predicted their own belief in either a fixed or growth mindset. Based off of the findings of these three studies, a parent’s failure mindset has an effect on a children’s view of intelligence more so than the parent’s own view on intelligence. In a failure debilitating mindset, a child is more than likely to believe that their intelligence, or intelligence in general, is fixed and cannot be improved. This mindset manifests itself due to several factors that were studied during the experiment. First the failure mindset of a parent is more visible to the child than their intelligence mindset. Because of this visibility, a failure debilitating mindset of a parent will have a greater impact on their child than they

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