I've just finished reading
this book and I think many people here might enjoy it. (I'm sure many have read it, but this recommendation is for the others!) I opted for this rather than for her other book Mindsets because the Amazon reviews of the latter sounded as though it had rather too much of the content popularised out. Self-theories is still an easy read (she's left out all the stats!) but it's contentful and does a reasonable job of explaining the experiments they did. Most of her original research papers from which this is drawn are easily available online if one prefers to read them, but I fancied a pre-digested version.
The book has a chapter that relates to the "only praising children" thread, but its main substance is discussion of the different theories that people hold about intelligence (and other personal characteristics). In a nutshell, "entity theorists" consider intelligence to be basically fixed. Therefore - regardless of whether they see themselves as having a little or a lot of this quality - they tend to see a challenge as an opportunity to demonstrate their innate qualities, or, if the challenge seems too hard, as a threat. "Increment theorists" by contrast see intelligence as something that can be improved by work, and are more likely to see challenges as opportunities to do this. We could go off into "but which is TRUE", and if we took intelligence to be synonymous with what IQ tests measure, we might perhaps come down on the entity theorist side, but the interesting thing is that for things that actually matter, like school success, an increment theory seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Dweck describes a study in which they looked at children moving from elementary school to their next school, in which the work was more challenging. They had samples of children who had been found to hold an entity view, and a sample who had been found to hold an increment view. There was no difference in the children's achievement to that point, or in their confidence in their ability. Yet the incremental theorists did significantly better in their first year at the new school than the entity theorists did, and the effect was still visible the following year. They also have some evidence that children's, and even adults', beliefs about the mutability of intelligence can to some extent be changed by instruction in a way which does change their feelings and choices.
This has clear implications for how we talk to our children about giftedness.
