Even YOU can get smarter

By contributing author Aimee Fountain, who splits her time between Lumos Labs and teaching at American River College.

According to an article published by Carol Dweck in the journal Educational Leadership, the type of praise students get is very much a factor in how they view their intelligence. And, how students view their intelligence is very much connected to their academic performance over time.

Students who were continually praised for being smart thought that intelligence was a fixed trait that they couldn’t do anything to affect, and which would manifest itself (or not) regardless of the effort put into a particular endeavor. Students who were praised for their efforts, on the other hand, associated their success with the amount of work they put in and, thus, concluded that their level of intelligence was malleable and dependent on their continued development and willingness to learn.

Students who believed that their intelligence was innate were inclined towards activities that would confirm or show-off their intelligence and avoided those activities which required effort. However, students who believed in the power of work to increase ability were much more likely to take on challenges and persist through them. The first group was also more likely to hide or lie about mistakes and deficiencies than the second group, which was inclined to correct them. Research in psychology and neuroscience supports this second group of students with evidence suggesting that the brain is really quite malleable and adaptive.

We get a lot of inquiries from people asking how their Lumosity scores stack up against the rest of the world (sound familiar? “How smart am I really?”). Thing is, when it comes to brain exercise, it doesn’t really matter how your score compares to others’. Instead, we hope that everyone plays to improve him/herself rather than to reconfirm or undermine his/her intelligence identity. A challenging curriculum should be viewed as an opportunity for growth and for developing new learning strategies.

Harness your growth potential! Intellectual development is not the natural unfolding of a finite amount of smarts!

Note added on November 29: For more on the topic of maximizing learning potential, see Scientific American’s December 2007 article The Secret to Raising Smart Kids.

See: Dweck, Carol S. Educational Leadership, October 2007 | Volume 65 | Number 2: Early Intervention at Every Age. ‘The Perils and Promises of Praise,” Pages 34-39.