Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Against the growth mindset

I am dubious of Carol Dweck's touted "growth mindset". She writes thing like this:

http://mindsetonline.com/whatisit/about/index.html
Well, most of what I've read about intelligence says that it is not malleable. We don't know how to raise IQ. Someone should study literature, or a foreign language, or mathematics because those subjects are worth studying or to get a useful credential, not because studying makes them smarter.

A detailed critique of the "growth mindset" that I recommend is

NO CLARITY AROUND GROWTH MINDSET…YET
BY SCOTT ALEXANDER
APRIL 8, 2015

I have always assumed that Dweck's point is not that IQ is malleable, but that effort ALSO matters. A specific example would be musical talent and practice - presumably for most accomplished musicians, practice plays an important role, and they wouldn't have gotten as far professionally on talent alone.

One reason so many parents are concerned about their children being "challenged" at school, is that they want to ensure the kiddos have the experience of seeing effort pay off, and to also thus allay perfectionist tendencies.

But perhaps I've misinterpreted her work?

No, I think you understand Dweck.

I think telling kids "you're so smart" is so toxic. I experienced this firsthand and it was harmful. One of the benefits of having my DS at a gifted private school is that they understand this and praise effort, persistence, and grit instead.

Well...it's pretty easy to REDUCE your intelligence. Hypoxia, certain drugs, chronic disease, chronic malnutrition, and head injuries spring to mind as tried-and-true methods. So in that regard, intelligence is quite malleable.

That said, I've never actually met anyone who believes that "talent alone creates success." I'm sure that there are some people like that out there, but if you discount everyone under age 14 or so, there probably won't be many left in that group.

I wonder if this kind of statement is just a feel-good way of dismissing the importance of talent. Americans are inclusive to a fault, and to me, this kind of writing (along with Malcom whatshisname's 10,000 hours garbage) is a way for people to pretend that anyone can be an astronaut, or an engineer, or even the president, and that all children are gifted (tm).

Then we send them to college to drop out of STEM majors and incur extra debt while getting "degrees" in subjects like liberal studies, bizniz, or journalism, after which they end up in low-paying benefit-free jobs in retail.

Yeah, well, there's a flip side to that argument. I was never told how intelligent I am, and it took a long time for me to figure out what I'm capable of as a result.

Why does this idea always, always seem to come down to pitting two sides against one another (the bad people who reveal IQ and make their kids lazy vs. the good people who don't and teach their kids about hard work)? How can you develop a talent if you don't know you have it or its extent?

Two of my kids have been tested, and they both know their IQs. They're also reminded constantly about the need for hard work and consequences of laziness.

Dweck's theory can be over-extended. Ability is, to a large degree, innate, with minimum sufficient levels existing in many domains below which even infinite effort will yield effectively no tangible improvement in performance.

This is not to discount the importance of effort to harness talent--far from it!--there are cases where hard work can beat talent when talent doesn't work hard.

Potential is innate. It's probably fixed, at least by 2-3yo.


Failure to reach that potential is variable, and attribution is also highly variable. It can happen for a lot of reasons-- structural, socioeconomic, motivational, etc. Or, in Val's list-- because of external factors which attenuate that original potential in some way.

SO sure, growth mindset speaks to the motivational limitations, which can be among the most potent limitations (since they don't respond to external mitigation or intervention).

Thanks for posting Alexander's article. I have struggled with the either/or posited by the Dweck approach since first hearing of it. Behavior and attitudes just aren't so simply defined. I also flat out don't like the continuation of the tired old nonsense about all these smart people who are always proving their intelligence and that all they care about is their IQ. (That's what I get from several sections of the Mindset website.)

I am in the camp of those who would say acknowledge talent, then set things up to allow the talent to develop through hard work and application.

Has anyone read her site's section on the 2006 Olympics (http://mindsetonline.com/forum/2006olympics/index.html)? She claims that the US athletes must have all been simply praised for their talents, believed that's all it took to win... so they just "phoned it in" and didn't do well. C'mon. What hogwash. They all got to the OLYMPICS on talent alone and then failed because they didn't try hard enough? PUHLEEZE.

It's been interesting to watch teachers at the elementary school in our area try to "teach" this mindset (Dweck's theory is currently quite popular in our area) to younger students. While I see a value in praising effort, what are students learning when they get excellent results from very little effort or poor results from tremendous effort? Does Dweck address this? Because I certainly would not want a child with a LD to be told that it is primarily a matter of effort - that simply isn't fair or realistic.

It's silly to assume that kids don't realize that there are differences in ability, they see it everyday in class. In general I believe in telling my son the truth, that brains matter, but effort is just as important. The latter point may not be as obvious to them if they don't encounter challenging material in school and is why it is so important for kids to be taught at their level. If they aren't challenged from an early age, they don't know that studying/working hard is important and will struggle later on as material becomes more difficult.

That's a fair point I think. It also brings us to another part of Dweck-ism which is not comparing oneself to others - instead compare your own current performance with your own past performance. With that in place it really is all about effort and work (since the LD kid will only be compared to where she was yesterday, or last week, or last year).

Yes, I can see how that would be beneficial. I have actually seen an example of that at my son's school. Each month they take a reading achievement test and are then given their results to plot on a graph in their folder. They are told not to share their results with others.

It was only partly effective in my son's case though as he noticed that one of his classmates had to add to his graph because it only goes up to 300 and he scored higher than that. My son's last score was a 297 and he told me that he wants to go over 300 so he can add to his graph too. Some kids are naturally competitive and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I do think it's good for that to not be the primary focus though.

IQ alone can't solve calculus problems.

This is my favorite Carol Dweck quote which I think most folks here would agree with:

"So what should we say when children complete a task—say, math problems—quickly and perfectly? Should we deny them the praise they have earned? Yes. When this happens, I say, “Whoops. I guess that was too easy. I apologize for wasting your time. Let’s do something you can really learn from!”

No here has said that it can. But the same is true of lack of IQ alone, except that 10,000 hours of practice still won't get some people through trigonometric substitution.

Talent matters, and people who try to wish that fact away by dismissing it in favor of lies about invariant outcomes of hard work are spoonfeeding a cruel lie to children. And these same people bleat that they're "giving everyone a chance," and that anyone who disagrees is obviously biased.

So we end up pushing students into courses they're not ready for or capable of, and we find ways to give them extra credit to compensate for low test scores. That way, everyone can get a good grade in geometry by "working hard." And we produce thousands of kids every year who graduate from high school with honors and promptly fail the math and English placement tests before they start their first semester of college.

Here's why I'm skeptical about Carol Dweck:


I would be grateful if someone could name even one mathematician who sat down after lunch one day, created and wrote up a major discovery by tea time, and then went off to the back-patting machine for some well-earned praise.

The thing is, when you have to make a point by lying, you really never had a point to make to begin with.

Bostonian is implying it with a rejection of the notion of the growth mindset and the identification of IQ as a fixed thing. So, IQ alone won't solve calculus... you still have to grow your math skills, regardless of your innate abilities.


Indeed. Ability matters. Effort matters. If we're going to turn this into a binary proposition, then there should be an AND gate in there, in order for the output to be GREATNESS (however you choose to define that). And we'd have to add other inputs: environment, opportunity, and health, for starters.


Well, if we look at the five inputs I've proposed up above, it's not terribly difficult to imagine that a person of above average ability, given great health, environment, opportunities, and effort will manage to do great things. And hey, look around, and you find that it's people who fit that exact profile who have all the power and wealth. So they're clearly on to something.

And in fact, "above average ability" would be something to aspire to for some of our national leaders.

As an aside there is a guy ( www.thedanplan.com ) who is trying the 10,000 hour thing in an effort to become a pro golfer - he is a bit more than halfway through the 10,000 hours and has improved a lot.

Man, NOW I really know what I want for my next big birthday present.

ITA, by the way-- when closely examined, most of the pop mythology about the great discoverers and innovators of Western Civilization comes up as about as close to obejective reality as, say, creation myths from primitive/tribal religious beliefs. It's just turtles, all the way down.

It actually took Newton a bit of effort to come up with just the very rudiments of thinking necessary to THINK about using calculus to solve simple puzzles of classical mechanics and motion. DD was certainly miffed to learn this after having believed (and been told) otherwise for many years.

Myself, I think that she was just disappointed to learn how much bloody hard WORK it all is, even if you're Newton. LOL.

How? Reading a calculus book will teach you that d/dx x^n = n*x^(n-1), which will help you solve calculus problems, but it won't raise your IQ. Thinking that IQ is fixed (or at least, very difficult to raise) does not mean you should not study.

Why did you quote that paragraph, but not the one that immediately follows, which fully fleshes out what Dweck means by "growth mindset"?


My reading of those two paragraphs makes the concept seem quite uncontroversial. Who here would deny that dedication and hard work are significant components of achievement and success and are things which should be encouraged?

There may be some people who believe that there are no differences in genetic/innate intellectual talent, but I've seen nothing that suggests Dweck is one of them.

Thank you! It's entertaining but no less relevant. I have personally been annoyed by the detrimental effects of "growth mindset" mania taken too far in our educational institutions.

Obviously effort is essential but ability no less so. No matter how often I am inundated by growth mindset mania, I simply do not believe that it is detrimental (at least for my high ability children) to remember that ability does significantly affect outcome.

Dweck claims that you can improve your innate ability through hard work. I disagree strongly.

You can improve your SKILL, but you can't improve your POTENTIAL.

So okay, you can't know your potential when you start developing a given skill. But lots of practice will give you a pretty good idea about where you'll end up, especially if you practice with other people or if you have access to what other people can do.

For example, I learned at an early age that I suck at drawing, and that no amount of practice will change that. Practice only makes my drawings less bad. My innate ABILITY simply will not change, though my skill might nudge a bit. I've tried several times over the years, and I know this for a fact.

I've taught undergrads, and I could see that some of my students just weren't good at [insert subject]. A few in each class tried hard, but they just couldn't do it anyway. I saw it when I was in school and when I was in college. There were the kids who just couldn't simplify the fractions, and the woman who failed statistics because she just couldn't understand it, in spite of lots of work. Etc.

What bugs me about Dweck and her ilk is the feel-good lying and the distortions. Admitting that not everyone has the same level of talent for academics or sports or whatever is discomfiting. But instead of accepting reality, Growth Mindset just pretends that anyone can do calculus or be a pro athlete if they work hard enough. And it blames its victims when they crap out, because, after all, if you work hard enough, you'll increase your ability.

A huge result of this is the everyone-can-go-to-college mentality (which, I admit, has other factors driving it). We spoon-feed lies to children and then send a message that they're not working when they fail the college entrance math exam or can't make it through year 1 or 2 of a STEM major. It must be soul-crushing for these kids to realize that they simply aren't up to it after being told that they were for so long. And it must be doubly crushing to keep hearing that hard work is all it takes.

First I am in and from NZ so this is an outsiders view.

I think the growth mindset meshes well with the US tenet that everyone can make something of themself if they try hard enough. Your whole system favours adapting a growth mid set approach. After all if it is true being poor or unskilled is personal choice.

I have more trouble with it being quoted here especially the 10,000 hours thing as NZ is a more socialist country which generally accepts that some people will need more help. It also strangely does have a slight class thing too.

I have recently come to think though if I had realised things required effort as a child I may have persisted with some things longer. I wouldn't have become great at them but I may have learnt to do a head stand.

I think that most of this comes from the gross oversimplification of all of this. The points made about growth mindset are good: talent is important, but effort is important, and you need BOTH. Not just one. The problem is a lot of people, at least in Carol Dweck's world,apparently don't realize the value of hard work -- hence growth mindset. The problem arises when people decided hard work is ALL of it, not PART of it. Let's face, not everyone is capable of everything. I think it's just as important for kids to learn and appreciate that there are some things they are not capable of as it to realize there are things they're capable of. Telling kids they can do anything is a nice, happy-feeling solution in the short term, but it's hurting them even more than a fixed mindset. I mean, I'll never be an artist either, but I can understand that and appreciate the effort on the part of those who can and the beauty of what they create, and that's important.

No, because that expression is equally meaningless to those who lack the intellectual ability necessary to understand the underlying concepts, and to those who lack the motivation to pursue them.

I agree with you Val I no fan of magical thinking here either.

I think that it is shockingly dishonest to lead children on like this.

Obviously, achievement involves more than just IQ, things like luck and grit also play a part. Even IQ comes down to luck or accident of birth, IMO.

The irrefutable fact is, however, that without a given threshold value of 'g' certain things are not going to be fully understood. Denial of that axiomatic truth sets people up for failure far more often than success, I believe.

This is where it kind of falls apart on the ground as far as applying all this to school. Still, I find the basics of Dweck useful for working with gifted kids. It has its limits.


As far as innate potential, I suppose I'm a bit more agnostic than some here. I don't think I believe in a fixed, immovable g set in stone at birth or age 3 or whatever. I think time and experience have a way of having their way with us, for good and ill. I think there is a range of capacity for each of us. It certainly is HARDER or EASIER for people to do or understand some things than others. But often I think we decide people are incapable of things when they've had bad teachers or have been unmotivated.

All this said, I have never told my children that they can "do anything" because it's not the kind of thing that I say. I prefer a bit more realism and exactitude. For instance, my DD likes to sing, but she knows that I think she is a decent singer, but not amazing. (She asked me.) I tell her she's getting better with practice, which is true, and that more practice will improve her more, which I assume to also be true. I'm not much on lying.

The point of this entire conversation is that there is a fixed, immovable *limit* on the *upper point* of that *range of capacity* for any particular person.

Perfectionistic tendencies may be a sign of developing a fixed mindset rather than a growth mindset. One aspect or application is that gifted kids may stop taking appropriate risks in order to always be "right" or always be "smart" or never be "wrong", and this may work against them. The concept is nicely summarized in these youtube videos:
Ashley Merryman & Po Bronson: The Myth of Praise (link- )
Teaching a Growth Mindset (link- )

Parents may wish to read the book Mindset by Carol Dweck for tips on promoting a growth mindset. It is based on years of research. Not that I agree with every idea/application, but on balance found a number of ideas to be useful.

And one problem is that it's not a fixed limit as such.

Modern IQ tests are largely derived from the military's AFQT. The AFQT exists solely to predict success in a variety of training schools. The more challenging schools have higher AFQT requirements to attend, in order to avoid wasting resources on recruits who have little chance of succeeding.

Those students selected for advanced training, based on their higher AFQT scores, still fail at a significant rate. The US Navy's most challenging school, nuclear power school, has so many failed students every year that they've been given a colloquialism: "nuclear waste."

The Navy's data tells them that this is to be expected, because they've been doing this long enough to see that an AFQT of X will yield Y% of successful graduates, as X goes down, so does Y, and it's not so much a hard limit as it is a continuum (although obviously their data set doesn't follow the numbers all the way down to Y=0).

Caution: Made up numbers below for illustration only.

So, if 40% if recruits with an AFQT of 85 can successfully graduate nuclear power school (or conversely, that 8% of recruits with a 99 AFQT fail), that says:

1) AFQT is telling you something.
2) There are other factors involved for the 40% of students who succeed/8% who fail, with ability being equal.

Whenever we talk about success and failure among individuals with equal levels of ability, we inevitably start talking about personality traits relating to increased effort: perseverance, grit, motivation, work ethic, etc. Those are traits that a growth mindset seeks to promote.

Agreed! May I add, in addition to talking about efforts, we begin talking about opportunity, specifically access to opportunity. Including opportunity to experience challenge, failure, resilience, and overcoming setbacks.

I have found Dweck's work very helpful - especially with a perfectionist gifted kid. Despite what others have posted I don't believe she says that "every one can do everything if they work hard enough" - it's more along the lines that if you do work hard you have a better chance of growing and actually realizing whatever potential is there. It may seem like an obvious point, but unfortunately it's missing from a lot of schools where the focus is on measuring and ranking, but not necessarily teaching.

I'm talking about the fixed limit once you add in maximum perseverance, grit, motivation, work ethic, etc.

Exactly-- it's not that there is some bright line there, that I'm capable of vector calculus, but not.... well, some way-out-there-esoteric-theoretical mathematics.

But it's probably there somewhere.

Are children with profound mental retardation capable of "learning to read?"

Well, yes, probably SOME of them are, given enough of the idealizing inputs discussed. But not all of them, and it may depend on your standards-- is this at the level of a 3rd grader? A sixth grader?

Can they simply "grow" into this task if they really, really want to, and we all "encourage" them enough?


I'd argue that the answer is "no." That's not to say that life ought to be filled with people saying "Nope, not for you."

Because people are complicated and surprising-- some of them probably CAN, in spite of all the predictive evidence arguing that they shouldn't be capable. This is how people escape from horrifying childhood circumstances and go on to prestigious careers, after all-- instead of prison.

I think that all of us here are discriminating enough not to throw the baby out with the bath water on everything that Dweck and others say. Obviously, kids need to be encouraged the push their boundaries and take risks. Of course, effort SHOULD be encouraged via praise.

Perfectionism is a risk for our kids and I am open to all and any suggestions for managing it.

But basically there are upper limits to potential as JonLaw so succinctly stated.

Having spent some time around profoundly (and severely) retarded kids, I'd have to disagree that even some of them can learn to read. They can't even talk (though some can learn some sign language). Our school system is very generous with them, and they may get aides in a classroom or, for those who can't go to school, get visits from aides who help them develop motor skills and so on. The experiences are enriching for them, but they don't learn learn reading skills. Certainly, some moderately retarded children may learn to read a little and write a few words.

I'm only pointing this out because it highlights the reality of ability limits. People who work with severely intellectually disabled children don't generally pretend that these kids can make themselves smarter if they work hard. Maybe this is because they spend a lot of time working with these kids and they get to know what that condition really means.

Maybe I sound mean. I don't know. Personally, I think it's meaner to tell a student with a barely average or below-average IQ that he can become an engineer if he just believes in himself and works hard.

Our society encourages people to stretch themselves, which is a good thing. I just think that we've reached a point where the idea gets taken way, way too far, and it does a lot of damage.

Can anyone actually provide a quote from Dweck along the lines that "anyone can do anything if they work hard enough". I don't think she's ever said that.

Agreed 100%... in fact, the baby-bathwater analogy occurred to me more than once during this discussion. Sure, Ms. Dweck may be saying some ill-considered things in support of her views, but it's also worth noting that this is becoming something of an industry for her. Regardless, I think we can discount some of her weirder statements and still accept that her core message is something of relevance and value.

And yes, there is definitely an upper limit, but the problem is, we don't really have an effective way to measure that. Like the AFQT, IQ is an imperfect measure at best, and the continuum is so large, that except for obvious, extreme cases, the concept of hard limits isn't really one with a lot of practical application.

Here are some of the things that Dweck actually says:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/217172.Carol_S_Dweck

“Genius is not enough; we need to get the job done.”
― Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential

“I believe ability can get you to the top,” says coach John Wooden, “but it takes character to keep you there.… It’s so easy to … begin thinking you can just ‘turn it on’ automatically, without proper preparation. It takes real character to keep working as hard or even harder once you’re there. When you read about an athlete or team that wins over and over and over, remind yourself, ‘More than ability, they have character.' ”
― Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

That's a pretty clear statement about what I've been complaining about: poor performance is invariably a consequence of not working hard enough. Believe in yourself and study "better," and you will achieve!

And of course, if you fail, it's your fault for not working harder or better or whatever. It's certainly not my fault for leading you down the garden path.

In the discussion here, performance in school has TWO components: ability and effort. Dweck dismisses ability as something that you can increase if you just work hard enough, and that is a lie.

Well, working harder/smarter is is the only lever that students have. They can't go back to God and ask for a different brain

And if you work a little harder, you will likely do a little better (at least locally). (and sure, there is eventually a diminishing marginal return or even a negative return on each additional marginal unit of effort expended).

The Dweck powerpoint I read sometime back (sorry can't find the link) made clear her view that success is a function of both ability and effort.

WE can.

The problem, as has been noted up-thread, is that college campuses (and honors classes, and AP offerings, and, and and) are being filled up with a lot of students who have been, um--


conditioned--

by people who have made it their mission (with considerable zeal, in fact) to convince those students that YES! THEY! CAN!

When, in point of fact, a fair number of them really cannot.


On the other hand, they DO have numbers on their side, and also, much more importantly, MONEY to spend on the endeavor (fruitless though it might ultimately be).

Do colleges turn them away? Why, NO. No, they do not. What they do entertain is the notion of "making a place at the table" for everyone. Because everyone "can" do it, see...



This is, paradoxically, WEAKENING the expectations in all academic settings-- which in turn makes it even less likely that kids like those of forum members will escape the forces that drive perfectionism to start with (success which it far too easy, nobody ever telling them that some things are just HARD, etc).

I don't know. I think that this toxic madness is harder to see until you've had a child thoroughly "processed" through the system as it is now. Common Core's woefully implemented roll-out has only made things worse. Because NO, we can not actually make children at the 20th percentile all perform at the 70th percentile, no matter how much we might WISH that it were so... and throwing more and more resources at this, burying our entire educational system in more and more standards, becoming ever narrower in what is considered "normative"-- none of that does a gosh darned thing about the fact that some people aren't that capable. They just aren't.

NOT all people are "gifted." Not in the g-loaded sense of that word. All people are worthwhile as human beings. All people have uniqueness and have value. Yes.

Sometimes, your best isn't good enough-- even if really, really IS your best.

I think that Val and I are both saying that it is just plain CRUEL to take on a blame mindset about that and torture people whose best isn't good enough with "but--but-- if you just TRIED harder, and BELIEVED in yourself a bit more, see..."

Well, it doesn't work with disabilities, does it? You can't wish those into the cornfield, and some activities are simply g-loaded and not everyone CAN do them.

Dweck claims that if you work harder, you get smarter:


and from that same page:


This is pseudoscientific garbage.

Just a small comment on ID individuals learning to read:

Many moderately impaired individuals have the capacity to learn to decode and encode, if taught explicitly. The real difficulty is comprehension. I know a not insignificant number of adolescents and adults with IQs in the intellectually disabled-moderately impaired range who can read and/or write fluently at what we consider an average adult level with regard to basic skills (and I'm not speculating about either the cognitive level or the academic level, as I did the evals myself)--but their comprehension, especially inferential comprehension, is limited by their cognition. This manifests in writing as simplistic ideas, poor or simple organization, and less complex sentence structures.

The severely impaired children I've seen usually can learn some environmental print, and sometimes primary-level reading and writing (<2nd grade).

Beyond that level of impairment, they're often working on skills like joint attention, and reliably activating switches.

I'm pretty sure that in her zeal to encourage people to keep learning and growing, she's stretching the truth by assigning intent where there may be none and exaggerating small samples to big populations (where exactly are all these people she repeatedly refers to who do nothing else but sit around saying/proving how smart they are? In my 20+ years in business plus time spent at a top-tier business school, I can only recall a small handful I'd describe as remotely like that, and in those cases, I would ascribe it to them just being jerks.)

This is such a fascinating discussion.

I definitely see how a person could develop a point of view where their perspective is "if something is hard, that means I can't do it because I'm not smart / talented / creative / whatever enough and failure is TERRIBLE... so better not try" and that this point of view is fundamentally unhelpful. A person could also develop a point of view that has a perspective like "effort is good, failure is a part of learning, I can get better by trying" and that this is a more useful way of approaching challenge.

People are not the same but everyone has challenges and the way we handle those challenges (whether it's learning to dress yourself or learning calculus) is important. And the way we communicate to kids has a huge impact on the perspectives and opinions they develop.

Now as for Dweck, her book is in the pop-psychology / self-help genre that necessarily oversimplifies and is more about the soundbite and the slogan rather than any thoughtful nuanced analysis. It's also going to be targeted primarily to the middle of the intelligence curve -- where most of her audience is.

For high LOG kids, the problem is somewhat different -- getting them challenged in the first place so that you can then demonstrate to them what learning (effort, failure, continued effort, improvement) really looks like. Replacing intellectual challenge with work volume in order to demonstrate the importance of effort completely backfires (the reward for all that work? you still didn't learn anything!).

The ideas in the book have been directly helpful for us in dealing with DD (we consciously shifted to praising effort and embracing failure). But these same good ideas can absolutely be misused by a school system -- and society -- more interested in pretending that everyone is the same than helping individuals reach their individual potentials.

Okay, I'll stand corrected there. Thanks.

I suspect that this means that the kids I knew (50-ish) were mostly in the very-severe to profound range. As I mentioned, there was just no way those kids would have been able to learn to read.

Or, the condition itself had an effect that impaired the ability to read in spite of IQ around 40-ish (there were floor problems in testing).

Put me down as one in favor of the growth mindset.

I was constantly praised and valued for being smart as a child, to the point where my intelligence became my identity. My mother even refused grade skips for me to ensure that I would always be "the smartest kid in the class."

It wasn't until I entered law school that all of this began to backfire, as I found myself entirely unprepared to deal with real challenge. Consequently, I hit a wall, never practiced law or came anywhere close to meeting my potential. Instead, I've been stuck in middle management, bored and frustrated for years.

However, in the course of doing research on how to raise my exceptionally gifted son, I found Dweck and all the anti-praise research. Reading much of it literally brought tears to my eyes. It described my psychology so perfectly and predicted my outcome so accurately that it made me feel like a puppet.

Since then, I've not only changed the way I'm raising my son (praising effort, ensuring he has ample opportunity to experience and overcome the discomfort that accompanies challenge), but I've also completely changed my own outlook. A decade-plus out of law school, I recently passed the bar exam and am starting a new career. I feel more hopeful and optimistic than I have in years.

So, for me at least, Dweck's research has been very profound and powerful stuff.

It's been very helpful for our family too (and I think Dweck has a lot to offer gifted kids who hear the toxic "you're so smart" all the time). (And big congratulations for passing the bar!)

A comment I would like to add is that with technology to assist in communication, we are finding that at least some children are not as severely affected in intellectual disability than was previously thought. The consequences of not trying to teach these students any academic topics therefore is much more troubling.

I think that most in the general population underestimate the abilities of people with ID.

Well, certainly not every 50-ish individual will learn to read or read well, but it's not a rare occurrence, especially in school systems that use phonetic approaches with those students (like Wilson or OG).

Oops. I meant that I met 50-ish of these kids over a period of 5-6 years or so. Many/most had IQs in the mid-40s or below (again, floor effects made it hard to calculate IQs in many of them). I thought that level was "severe" but maybe I was wrong?

I totally agree with this.

Also the parents are not the only ones telling these kids they are smart. The other kids at school maybe even teachers are telling them this, especially if they are younger and still at the top of the class. How could they not know. How would Dweck suggest you counter this with her anti-praise research?

We have praised effort and stepping out of your comfort zone for a long time with our ds but he knows what he is good/great at and what he is just OK at.

I don't think Dweck said you can or should hide this information: only that it's helpful to know that growth and change are possible.

OK. I'll bite.

How exactly did law school present a "challenge?"

This is more what I meant. I mean, not to say that there aren't differences in ability, but I do get nervous around the idea of "This Is Not For You." I know a lot of bright/not gifted kids and a lot of gifted kids, by IQ, and I don't feel like the sorting was extremely awesomely perfect. Do you all? I see outliers where it's clear the sorting mechanism was right, but I also see a lot of mushy middle where motivation, personality, grit, background, opportunity, teaching, parenting, LDs, whatever are obviously mattering a lot.

In addition, I also see gifted kids who have a lot of challenges, and may not be able to make the most of what they have intellectually due to those challenges. (Note: one of my children could be sorted into this category.) You could say their IQ is high, but their Other-Q (not necessarily EQ--many challenges in the world) is low. Some people might say--well, they have limits on what they can achieve, due to that low Other-Q. I don't think that opinion would be popular here.

All right, maybe Other-Q limitations are more malleable, but you see what I'm getting at, hopefully.

I don't think that's the right way to look at the question (actually, when it's framed this way, it makes it very easy to slide gently into the everyone-can-try-anything mindset).

Rather, I think that schools and society as a whole have a responsibility to help kids discover what they're GOOD at. Instead, we tell everyone to go to college, as though a BA is a career panacea.

Well, it *is* a career panacea for the College Administration Bureaucracy Complex.

No, you're right. 40s is usually considered severe, though, as you say, the precision of the assessments becomes rather loose in that range. It's not that all of them can learn to read, it's that not all of them can't learn to read, if you know what I mean. Also, if you were meeting them earlier in their school experience, they would have been expected to be even earlier in their literacy development. I'm thinking more of IQ 40-50 late adolescents, who have acquired roughly second- or third-grade reading skills, and some 50s late adolescents with grade level decoding skills.

Good point. Interestingly, you can also drastically reduce a child's IQ by having them spend their first few years in a crib most of the time with a rotating staff of temporary caregivers. And then raise it again if they get adopted into a good home, though you can't necessarily reverse the damage completely. Research on institutionalized and post-institutionalized children is probably the best evidence in support of the idea that IQ is malleable. However, what some people overlook is that this research suggests a critical age period, after which IQ stops being so malleable. A kid with a normal potential who has spent the first 5 years in a severely depriving institutional setting will probably remain in the cognitively impaired range even after adoption. If he'd been adopted after 1 year, he'd have turned out a lot better.



Yeah. I have a motor coordination impairment due to autism. If I work really hard in karate, I'll get more coordinated than I am now. But will I ever stop being clumsy? I doubt it.



Interestingly, I've read some research suggesting that Down Syndrome kids (whose average IQ is about 50) have a specific advantage in learning sight word reading. They can often be taught to read as young as preschool age, and learning to read generally improves their speech skills. Which we wouldn't have figured out if someone hadn't decided to try to teach a cognitively disabled 3 year old something most kids learn at age 6.

But isn't sending your child to a "gifted private school" a statement that "you are very smart, so much so that you need an education different from what average children get"? It is a statement backed by tens of thousands of dollars of tuition money.

I don't often directly tell my oldest that he is very smart. But when I had him take the SAT before age 9, one reason was to give him some data on how smart he is. When I tell him he should try to become a competitive candidate for admission to the most selective colleges, that is another way telling him he is very smart.

This blog post on a recent paper co-authored by Carol Dweck, Mindset Interventions Are A Scalable Treatment For Academic Underachievement , confirms my view that she is intellectually dishonest.

GROWTH MINDSET 3: A POX ON GROWTH YOUR HOUSES
by Scott Alexander
April 22, 2015

Some may say that determining whether growth mindset raises grades is an apples-and-oranges application. To the degree that a growth mindset encourages embracing challenge and appropriate risk taking, it might actually lower GPA for students moving from comfortably easy material to studying at their challenge level or zone of proximal development.

This statement may express the views of critics of gifted education.

By contrast, a statement which proponents of gifted education may make might be: "You are ready to take on a challenge, and unfortunately may lose that ability/readiness if you do not have the opportunity to embrace struggle and striving." Note this has no comparison to others, but rather is a statement about one's own developmental needs, and the ways in which the needs may match the available opportunity, and the potential negative consequences if one does not avail themselves of the challenging opportunity.

Some may see this as a statement that a particular program of interest at any of these colleges may provide a challenge worthy of his potential, the proverbial antelope for him to chase.

It certainly is not. My child is not eligible even for public K. The public system does not want us, not the other way around. We have 2 working parents, so we do require some kind of private school or child care. I'm very glad we have found one that seems to work well.

I still like Dweck. She has given me a language and toolkit that works for me in my life. And no outpouring of opprobrium will convince me otherwise.

I totally agree with this.

The issue isn't whether your child knows they are smart, but whether being smart is what they are praised for. It is when a child realizes that they are valued for being smart that they develop the need to maintain that appearance at all costs--even at the cost of actually learning or growing. It's when being smart becomes your identity and source of self-esteem that the label becomes a source of anxiety and challenge becomes something to avoid.

Well said.

I don't get it. How is IQ not malleable? To me, it obviously is. Let's look at the WAIS. One of the subtests measures the size of one's vocabulary. Let's say, you have a child who never used to read. She considered it boring. She was still smart though. Suppose she was good at logical reasoning. Hence, you she got through school and ended up doing well on tests and what not. Suppose she took the WISC as a kid and bombed the vocab section.

Suppose, as an adult she takes on a reading intensive major and starts reading a lot more. If you made her take the WAIS now, she'd score higher on the vocab subtest. Let's say her other scores stay constant. Hasn't her IQ increased? If this isn't convincing just imagine that she also reads up on current affairs a lot more as an adult. So, her information subtest score also increases. Again, hasn't her IQ increased?

Maybe potential is fixed but IQ isn't potential. IQ is something that imperfectly correlates to potential.

This is a classic example of cystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence (or fluid reasoning).

FWIW, I think IQ score is a rather imperfect measure of ability. I do think ability, or at least expression of ability (er, is that just performance?), can change, especially to the extent that a child's processing improves (over time or, say, with therapies). However, in the particular example you suggest, it seems to me that the adult version of the person demonstrates better performance rather than increased inherent ability. On the other hand, if ability is simply the potential for performance, perhaps you are correct. Maybe the question for this example is the extent to which vocabulary is truly indicative of ability as opposed to performance as a proxy for ability. I'm getting tongue-tied here...

In the 20s, actually, but the news is not all bad ...

Older Really Can Mean Wiser
by BENEDICT CAREY
New York Times
March 16, 2015

Fluid intelligence, working memory, and processing speed all peak around age 23, while crystallized intelligence (closely associated with verbal intelligence) peaks in the 20s and holds or increases somewhat across the lifespan, absent other pathology. Our capacity to use crystallized and fluid intelligence effectively increases over the lifespan (this is the Wisdom leg of Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of Intelligence, also known as Successful Intelligence).

You may find this series of graphs from the standardization data on the WJIII of interest:

http://www.iapsych.com/iapresreport7.pdf

ETA: I realize that something cannot both peak and increase somewhat afterward, but this was less clunky than a more accurate statement reflecting the end of the steep portion of the GC growth curve.

IOW... it increases at a diminishing rate.

Your source didn't really note anything about the IQs of the test subjects, though it did say something about W-scores that were +/- 1SD. Were the subjects in the study representative of the population? If so, this means that most of them had IQs between 70 and 130, with most between 85 and 115.

I'm going to speculate that working memory, processing speed, etc., may peak sooner in people with lower IQs and later in people with higher IQs. I have little evidence for this statement, and will look it up later when I'm not working. If someone knows of a study on this exact subject (or a review, ideally), I'd be grateful if you could post a link here.

Either way, I don't think one can generalize cognitive results from people in the middle of the distribution to people who are >3 SD from the mean.

Pointed noted, Val. The data set that I linked is the WJIII standardization pool, which is indeed representative of the US population. Nothing is said about the IQs of the test subjects because that is what was being obtained during standardization. It is as generalizable to +3 SD as any other large-scale population sample is, including those we use to derive IQs. (After all, it literally is the data used to derive IQs.) Which is to say, better than nothing.

The other point to consider about that data is that it is not longitudinal, so it tells us mainly about the distribution of cognitive and academic skills in people of different ages, not directly about how cognition changes over the lifespan.

Thanks, indigo, for improving my verbal expression!

FWIW, although not recent, Val's hunch brought to mind this about gifted brain development and EF: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2006/cortex-matures-faster-in-youth-with-highest-iq.shtml (also discussed here: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/unwrapping_the_gifted/2010/02/what_brain_imaging_shows_us_ab.html).

Apologies (blush).

I finally had use for one of my favorite expressions outside of the context of our local school board announcing it is cutting something... when in fact they are increasing it, just not as much as they used to.

Thank you for posting these links. The archives of Tamara Fisher's "Unwrapping the Gifted" are excellent!

I also have the recommended book, "How the Gifted Brain Learns" and may update my post on a recent thread where a teacher was seeking resources.

Well, I'm going with both. Yes, I tell DD she's smart - she needs some explanation for being a bit of an outlier. And yes, I praise her efforts, and if she announces she "sucks" at something (and at 8 it's usually something like handstands tbh) I tell her no, you just need to practice it. And yes she is getting better at handstands although she'll never join the circus
As a kid I had a) no idea I was smart and b) no idea how to work hard. I always say parents in the 70s had it so easy - did anyone else get the old joke, "what happened to the last 5%?" if you came home with a 95%? Even now I still feel demoralized!!
At least I feel I'm one up in that I'm aware of and thinking about these issues, even if I sometimes get them slightly wrong