By Megan Sumeracki

The further along students advance in school, and for some onto training opportunities after school (e.g., medical school, law school, training at work), the more they need to take control of their own learning. For example, it is great when teachers implement effective learning strategies into their classes, and also when students are taught how to engage in the effective learning strategies on their own. Ideally, by the time students are ready for higher education and beyond, they can learn and study information more on their own in an effective way. But how do we encourage students to make the study choices that are the most effective when they study on their own?

Yaoping Peng and Jonathan Tullis (1) published a pair of experiments examining whether thinking about intelligence in different ways would affect the way students make choices when learning independently. Their results point to one way teachers can frame intelligence, and hopefully promote thinking about intelligence in this way to improve study choices. Continue to read about the procedure and results, or you can skip to the “Bottom Line” section at the bottom!

The Experimental Design and Procedure

The participants in these experiments were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (or MTurk). This means that the participants were not just college students, but could be anyone interested in completing the experiment online.

(Note: Presumably all participants were over the age of 18 and were, therefore, able to provide their own consent; however, the authors do not report participant demographics.)

Participants in Experiment 1 first read a fake psychology article meant to encourage them to think about intelligence in one of two ways.

• Intelligence is Fixed: In one condition, the participants read an article that discussed intelligence as something that is innate and unchanging. This article taught the participants that intelligence is fixed; you simply have as much intelligence as you have.

• Intelligence can be Improved. In another condition, the participants read an article that discussed intelligence as something that can be improved. The article taught the participants that effort and practice can lead to greater levels of intelligence.

Then, the participants learned a list of words on the computer. As each word was presented, they indicated how well they thought they would remember the word on a test later, and then they decided whether they wanted to restudy the word again. The participants could only choose up to half of the words to restudy, so they could not just restudy everything.

After each word was presented once, they participants got to restudy the words that they had marked for restudy. Finally, all participants completed a memory test to see how well they remembered the words. They also answered questions about their view of intelligence to see whether the articles they read had any effect on their thinking about intelligence.

The Results

The participants that read the article about intelligence being fixed were much more likely to endorse statements in line with intelligence being fixed than the participants that read the other article. This result shows that reading the article assigned to their experimental condition did have an effect on the way they thought about intelligence.

Overall, participants generally chose to restudy words that they thought they were less likely to remember than words they thought they were more likely to remember. However, the participants in the intelligence can be improved condition were more likely to choose words they thought were more difficult to restudy. In addition, participants in the intelligence can be improved condition also did better on the memory test than participants in the intelligence is fixed condition. In other words, reading the articles emphasizing that intelligence can either be improved or is fixed had an influence on the study choices participants made, and thinking that intelligence can be improved led to tackling the most difficult words during restudy and ultimately led to better test performance later.

The authors explained that when the participants were told intelligence can be improved, they may have thought that restudying the words they had not learned very well would lead to the most growth. When the participants were told intelligence is fixed, the words they thought they had not learned very well may have been reminded of their limitations, and could have led to avoiding the words they perceived as the most difficult to learn and remember.

A Second Experiment

In Experiment 2 the researchers used the same general method but added another variable. The researchers also manipulated the size in which each study word was presented. This was done to manipulate fluency, and thus to try to drive judgments of how well words were learned up or down in a systematic way. For educational purposes, this manipulation is not particularly relevant (though it does help us understand how decisions about studying track with assessments of how well the participants think they have learned the words).

Overall, the results of this experiment were the same as the first experiment. Those who were told intelligence can be improved chose the words they thought they had learned most poorly to restudy. Those who were told intelligence is fixed did not show as strong a preference to restudy the most poorly learned words.

Bottom Line

How we think about intelligence can drive how we make study decisions! When participants were told that intelligence is fixed, their restudy preferences were different than when participants were told intelligence can be improved with effort and practice. Specifically, when participants were told that intelligence can be improved with effort and practice, they were more likely to choose to restudy words that they perceived as more difficult for them to learn and remember. It seems that beliefs about intelligence affected learners’ goals. Thinking about intelligence as something that can be improved with effort and practice seems to lead to taking on more challenges during restudy, which can improve learning and memory!

Other researchers (2) have shown that interventions taking place across a semester to teach 7th grade students that intelligence can be improved and is malleable had positive impacts on how students viewed study effort and more difficult learning strategies. Their motivation increased, as did their grades compared to a control group.

Teaching learners that intelligence can be improved, and the importance of effort and practice to improve intelligence, can have positive impacts on learners’ study choices and overall effort.

References:

(1) Peng, Y., & Tullis, J. G. (2019). Theories of intelligence influence self-regulated study choices and learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 46(3), 487-496. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000740

(2) Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007).  Theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and intervention. Child Development, 78(1), 246-263. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.00995.x