Excerpt from The Art of Learning - Josh Waitzkin

The vast majority of motivated people, young and old, make terrible mistakes in their approach to learning. They fall frustrated by the wayside while those on the road to success keep steady on their paths. Developmental psychologists have done extensive research on the effects of a student 's approach on his or her ability to learn and ultimately master material.

Dr. Carol Dweck, a leading researcher in the field of developmental psychology, makes the distinction between entity and incremental theories of intelligence. Children who are entity theorists, that is, kids who have been iutiuenced by their parents and teachers to think in this manner are prone to use language like "I am smart at this" and to attribute their success or failure to an ingrained and unalterable level of ability. They see their overall intelligence or skill level at a certain discipline to be a fixed entity, a thing that cannot evolve, Incremental theorists, who have picked up a different modality of learning - let's call them learning theorists - are more prone to describe their results with sentences like

"I got it because I worked very hard at it" or "i should have tried harder." A child with a learning theory of intelligence tends to sense that with hard work, difficult material can be grasped step by step, incrementally, the novice can become the master. Dweck's research has shown that when challenged by difficult material, learning theorists are far more likelyto rise to the level of the game, while entity theorists are more brittle and prone to quit. Children who associate success with hard work tend to have a "mastery-oriented response" to challenging situations, while children who see themselves as just plain "smart" or "dumb," or "good" or "bad " at something , have a "learned helplessness orientation."

Submitted August 16, 2016 at 06:58AM by mackowski http://ift.tt/2aZr1zi