Back in college they instituted a reform in the basic undergraduate curricula called RGEP. This allowed students to choose what general educations subjects to take with certain restrictions. This was met with celebration by a few friends from CAL(College of Arts and Letter), they were celebrating because for them this meant that they can fully skip taking even one math course, through my mildly probing questions (some would say interrogation) I was able to find out that they believed themselves NOT GOOD in math, they seem to believe that they won’t get good in math. This saddened me. (although one was dreaming of graduating with honors and didn’t want to risk a mediocre grade in math subjects). This afflicts most of us, we do a few things well and when faced with the initial problems when trying to get better at something we stop. I say push through, forge your skill from this frustration and anxiety.
Practical Application
Blackwell, Dweck, and Trzesniewski (2002) recently replicated and applied this research with seventh-grade students in New York City. During the first eight weeks of the spring term, these students learned about the malleability of intelligence by reading and discussing a science-based article that described how intelligence develops. A control group of seventh-grade students did not learn about intelligence’s changeability, and instead learned about memory and mnemonic strategies. As compared to the control group, students who learned about intelligence's malleability had higher academic motivation, better academic behavior, and better grades in mathematics. Indeed, students who were members of vulnerable groups (e.g., those who previously thought that intelligence cannot change, those who had low prior mathematics achievement, and female students) had higher mathematics grades following the intelligence-is-malleable intervention, while the grades of similar students in the control group declined. In fact, girls who received the intervention matched and even slightly exceeded the boys in math grades, whereas girls in the control group performed well below the boys.
These findings are especially important because the actual instruction time for the intervention totaled just three hours. Therefore, this is a very cost-effective method for improving students’ academic motivation and achievement.
via Believing You Can Get Smarter Makes You Smarter.