Beliefs that Motivate
Students who think they can become smarter will put in more effort and embrace challenges.
By Glenda S. Stump, Jenefer Husman, and Marcia Corby
Consider the following scenario that occurs all too frequently in a college classroom. Two students attend class regularly, submit assignments on time, and generally seem to be “doing well” from an instructor’s perspective. This rather ordinary state of affairs continues until both students receive a low score on the first exam. At this point, the students’ attitudes, approaches to the class, and eventual performance begin to diverge. Student #1 asks the instructor to suggest different study strategies that might help her learn the class material, stating, “This class is different from others I have taken. I know I can learn the material if I just change my approach and devote a little more time to learning.” Student #2 begins to miss lectures, and attends recitation sessions long enough to ask pointed questions about completing homework problems. She eventually drops the class, and when asked why she chose this route, she responds, “I am just not good at the subject.” Why do these two students differ so significantly?
Carol Dweck, a Stanford University psychologist, suggests that these students’ behaviors are motivated by their beliefs about the nature of intelligence. Dweck describes these beliefs as being either incremental or entity. Students with incremental views of intelligence believe that intelligence is malleable and can be increased with sufficient effort. These students focus on increasing their knowledge; they view exertion of effort as a positive behavior and often seek to improve their ability by selecting challenging activities and applying appropriate effort to learn. When faced with failure or setbacks, they attribute their difficulties to ineffective strategies or effort, and they vow to work harder.
Conversely, students with entity views believe that intelligence is an innate, fixed quality, and that expenditure of effort means they must lack sufficient ability. Consequently, students with entity beliefs worry about having enough intelligence and focus on confirming or proving their ability relative to others. They often choose easier tasks to preserve their high performance status, exert less effort to learn, and attribute failure or setbacks to a lack of intelligence.
Understanding the relationship between students’ beliefs and their approaches to learning can inform efforts to improve retention and success in engineering programs. Our study examined the extent of entity or incremental beliefs in a sample of 377 engineering students at a large public university. We also examined the relationship between these beliefs and students’ active learning strategies (collaboration and knowledge-building behaviors), self-efficacy (confidence in the ability to learn course material and do well in the course), and achievement. We collected data via surveys that students completed either online or in the classroom. Our results showed that, overall, incremental beliefs were stronger than entity beliefs. Students’ incremental beliefs were positively related to collaboration and knowledge-building behaviors, whereas entity beliefs were negatively related to them. Self-efficacy, reported use of collaboration, and incremental beliefs about intelligence predicted students’ reported use of knowledge-building behaviors. Contrary to prior findings by Dweck, these critical motivational beliefs did not predict course grades.
Our results demonstrate that identifying these motivational beliefs can help us understand individual students’ learning efforts. The results also suggest that engineering instructors should support incremental views of intelligence among their students. Praise or feedback that emphasizes the results of effort and de-emphasizes natural or innate ability is an important means to help students focus on events over which they have control. Other means, such as providing examples of personal experiences or other students’ experiences in which increased effort led to successful learning, and avoiding practices that cause students to compare themselves with others, such as posting exam grades, are also helpful. These simple strategies can help students focus on behaviors that promote their learning.
Glenda S. Stump is a research assistant professor in the Learning Sciences Institute’s Chi Learning & Cognition Lab at Arizona State University, where Jenefer Husman is an associate professor in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics and director of education for the QESST Engineering Research Center. Marcia Corby is an instructor of mathematics at Phoenix College. This article was adapted from “Engineering Students’ Intelligence Beliefs and Learning” in the July 2014 issue of the Journal of Engineering Education. This work was supported by NSF grant REC-0546856.