Incremental Theory Compare And Contrast Mueller And Dweck

Mindset is a way in which a person thinks. A person’s mindset determines how they approaches difficult situations. Dweck is particularly talking about how an individual’s mindset towards intelligences and personality determines how successful they will be in life. If an individual has an entity theory they believe that they cannot change things about themselves such as, how smart they are or what type of personality they have. However, if a person has an incremental theory they believe the exact opposite of the entity theory. The incremental theory is that a person has the ability to change things about themselves. They can change whether they are smart or not, they can also control what type of personality they have.
As a teacher, being able
You can also acknowledge and reward when a student has become noticeably more intelligent. However, you should not reward or praise the result but rather the process they had to endure to reach the result. According to the mindset article (2012), “What is surprising about Mueller and Dweck’s (1998) finding is that many parents or educators might believe that praising students for being “smart” could buffer them from feeling “dumb” when they encounter a setback. Ironically, however, the opposite is true. Research on implicit theories shows we should not praise children for being “smart” when they do well, but rather, to promote resilience, praise them for the process they engaged in—their effort, their strategies, their focus, or their persistence” (p. 310-311). Always encouraging your students to put in time to learn new things and broaden their knowledge is also a good way to help students have a stronger mindset. Another good way is to help break down the task which they see as difficult and help them to see them as fun or enjoyable challenges. A small change in wording can go a long way in ones thought pattern. It has been proven that students that believe in the incremental theory have higher grades, so if you can help shift a student’s mindset into a stronger growth mindset then they will become more successful and nothing is more encouraging than success. According to Dweck (2012), it is not only about effort. A person also needs to study skills that allow them to use their brain in a more intelligent way. They essentially must practice the correct way in order to get better at something (p.