“Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers”

Multitasking 

• Humans have limited resources available to attend to, process, encode, and store info 

• Multitasking means dividing resources 

• Leads to performance decrements 

Praise for intelligence

• Rather than praising intelligence or ability, you should praise effort

Goals of studies

• How praise for (IV) intelligence vs (IV) effort impacts: 

  • Attributions 

  • Goal orientation 

  • Beliefs about intelligence 

  • Enjoyment 

  • Persistence 

  • Actual performance 

    • The list are DV’s

Proposition

• Praise for intelligence teaches children that they can measure how smart they are from how well they do 

  • If I do well, I’m smart 

  • If I don’t do well, I must not be smart

• They come to focus on ability as a stable trait

Attribution Theory

• Possible causes of performance 

	Stable	Unstable
Internal	Ability	Effort
External	Task Difficulty	Luck

• From prior research: how we attribute the cause of a behavior impacts our response 

• Question: Can the form of praise alter one’s attribution?

Study 1

• 128 American 5th Graders 

• 3 sets of 10 standard progressive matrices (progressive matrix task) 

• Set of 10, moderately difficult 

• All Ss told they’d done very well (80% correct)

• Independent variable: type of praise 

  • Ability: You must be smart at these problems 

  • Effort: you must have worked really hard at these problems 

  • Control: none 

• DV: What do you want next? (a kind of goal)

  • “Problems that aren’t so hard, so I don’t get many wrong” (Performance goal)

  • “Problems that are easy, so I’ll do well” (Performance goal) 

  • “Problems that I’m pretty good at, so I can show that I’m smart” (Performance goal)

  • “Problems that I’ll learn a lot from, if I don’t look so smart” (Learning goal)

• 3 performance questioned used to offset social desirability of the learning goal 

• Purpose of the question was just to get a measure of their goal orientation, told they would do their choice later and move on as planned 

• Complete 2nd set of (more difficult) problems 

• “You performed a lot worse” (<50% correct)

• DVs: self reports 

1. Persistence (want to take these home to work on?)

2. Enjoyment (6-point scale) 

3. Perceptions of the quality of their performance (6-point scale)

4. Attributions for poor performance (lack of effort, lack of ability, lack of time) 

• Complete 3rd set of problems (moderately difficult again) 

• DV: performance (all they cared about was how well they did 

  • Key: this was their performance post-failure

study 1 method

• Set 1, success + praise (ability, effort, non)

• Set 2, failure 

  • DV: persistence, enjoyment, quality, attributions 

• Set 3

  • DV performance (after failing on set 2)

study 1 results

• Proportion of children who selected performance goals rather than learning goals (set 1) 

  • Which group should have a higher proportion of performance goals?  

    • Intelligence praise groups 

  • To which group is the control group more similar? 

    • Intelligence praise group

Response to Failure 

• Children praised for intelligence attributed failure to a lack of ability more than children praised for effort 

• Children praised for effort assigned greater weight to low effort than did children praised for ability 

Post-failure task persistence 

• Children who were praised for intelligence were less likely to want to persist than were children praised for effort 

Post failure task enjoyment 

Children praised for intelligence enjoyed the tasks less than did children praised for effort

study 3 research questions

• Research questions

  • Can we replicate the results of study 1? 

  • What do children care about more after failure? 

    • How their peers performed 

    • How to get better at problems 

  • How do children represent their task performances to others 

study 3 method

• Same as study 1, plus…

  • After failure, choose 1 of the  2 folders to read 

    • “Interesting new strategies” (learning goal)

    • “Average scores of your peers” (performance goal)

• Children were asked to report their scores confidentially to an anonymous child in a school in another state 

study 3 results replication portion

• Study 1 was fully replicated 

• Proportion of children who misrepresented their scores: intelligence (lied about their scores more than the other two groups)