Is children’s intelligence malleable? Parental perspectives on implicit theories of intelligence
Engelsk titel: Is children’s intelligence malleable? Parental perspectives on implicit theories of intelligence
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Författare:
Rautiainen, Riitta
;
Räty, Hannu
;
Kasanen, Kati
Email: riitta.rautiainen@uef.fi
Språk: Eng
Antal referenser: 31
Dokumenttyp:
Artikel
UI-nummer: 17015540
Sammanfattning
This study set out to examine a little-researched topic: parents’ theories of the malleability of
children’s intelligence. The aim of the study was to examine the structure and the reliability of a
questionnaire concerning the malleability of intelligence, based on Dweck’s (1999) theory and
sent to a sample of Finnish parents. Further points of interest were whether the parents held
incremental theories rather than entity theories of children’s intelligence, whether there were
differences in the parents’ implicit theories of intelligence associated with their education and
gender and their child’s grade level and gender, and whether the parents’ implicit theories of
intelligence were associated with their child’s school performance. The participants (n = 97) were
mothers and fathers of girls (n = 48) and boys (n = 49) of the third and the sixth grades. The rating
scale was found to be one-dimensional and internally reliable. The parents mainly leant on
incremental
views of children’s intelligence. Moreover, their theories of the malleability of intelligence
were associated with their child’s school performance: the better the child’s school performance,
the more inclined the parents to endorse entity theories of children’s intelligence, and the poorer
the child’s school performance, the more inclined the parents to endorse incremental theories.
The parents’ implicit theories of intelligence seemed to be experiential and to be purposefully
adapted to their own child’s schooling.