LEARNING FROM SETBACKS

On my posting, dated April 21, I reported on the research of Carol S. Dweck. Dweck has derived a set of findings that might seem counter intuitive. She presents these findings as challenges to generally held beliefs which her research undermines with counter evidence. The first of these challenges is “[t]he belief that students with high ability are more likely to display mastery-oriented qualities.”¹ Common sense would seem to tell us that those students who are gifted with higher, natural ability levels would exhibit behaviors and attitudes that would in effect say, “bring it on” when faced with a difficult or daunting problem. They, one supposes, would relish such situations and when faced with a setback, they would find a way to overcome it. What Dweck found was that many of them exhibit more worry over failure and are more apt to question the possibilities of them solving or overcoming the obstacles before them. This sort of reaction, in turn, disposes them to a self-defeating pattern. Her research has led to important findings concerning the attitudes, particularly motivations, involved with difficult school work.

As I stated in that previous posting, a lot of what goes on with students faced with challenging work has to do with the particular view of intelligence that students and, for that matter, a lot of people in general hold. Do they believe intelligence is a fixed quantity or is it malleable and something a person can cultivate? Dweck found that a large portion of these students – and the population – believes intelligence to be a fixed resource. I indicated that I would have further comment on Dweck's findings. In this posting, I want to address the first faulty assumption, described above, that is just not true but held among too many naturally advantaged students.

This research indicates that for these students' vulnerabilities, the opposite of mastery is not a function of skill level or even past experiences of success. A sense of vulnerability is felt as helplessness. That is, these bright students, who, upon being challenged with a vexing problem, lack a sense of mastery and find themselves feeling the challenge as something beyond their control. These students express the situation as being denigrating to their intelligence. Their expectations plummet and their motivation to pursue a solution disappears. This is not the case for all high skilled students, but, in terms of Dweck's subjects, the rate was 50 percent. Why do so many of these opt to be negative, to be easily defeated in their quest to solve difficult problems?

What seems to be most at work among these students is their disposition to blame their lack of intelligence and voice the notion that they don't have what it takes to be successful in the situation they are facing. This reaction to setbacks is quite different from those who do hold mastery-oriented perspectives – the other 50 percent. Dweck reports that the “helpless” students did not perform any worse than students who were mastery-oriented. They often withheld formulating their defeated belief until encountering a setback or mistake even after experiencing earlier successes in which they maintained a positive view during those successes. But once an obstacle or failure was experienced, these students turned from a positive disposition to a negative one almost instantly. As opposed to mastery-oriented students, they had little to no belief they could solve the problems in the future – a third of them informed the researchers they could not solve the same problems, even after they did solve them, again. They also expressed boredom with the tasks and tried to deflect the failure by alluding to other areas in which they had been previously successful.

The patterns exhibited by mastery-oriented students were quite different. These students did not blame their intelligence for any failures – as a matter of fact, they didn't blame anything. Instead, they seemed to own the problem, engaging in self-instruction and self-incremental evaluations. Both of these activities were aimed at improving their performance. Setbacks were not disdained, but instead were often welcomed – they seemed to relish the challenge mistakes offered. This, in turn, led many to develop newer, more sophisticated strategies to attack the problem. Whereas the “helpless” students expressed failure as a reflection of their own lack of self-worth, mastery-oriented students did not talk this way. The self-defeated students saw failure in terms of risk, as a source for others considering them less worthy. Mastery-oriented students did not attach risk to their task or to the results of their efforts – they remained positive about themselves and their challenge. And one more thing: mastery-oriented students seemed to know more reasonably when to quit a problem either because they lacked the necessary sophistication or the problem was out of their league. Helpless students, the few who did not quit early, were more apt to stick to the problem beyond rational limits of time.

What does all of this work with bright students mean to the general population of students? One needs to remember that brighter students generally are faced with easy – for them – schoolwork most of the time. They go through the school day meeting one success after another. But what if they do face “difficult” work that, no matter how bright they are, will result in mistakes or failures? For example, what happens when these students face mathematics problems when they are confronted with new concepts or processes? By being able to focus on these encounters – and analyzing these students' reactions – researchers can gain insights about what other, less advantaged students might face on a more recurring basis. By being able to categorize two prevailing patterns – helpless and mastery – we can describe the patterns and begin to understand why a given student will follow one pattern as opposed to the other. One thing was clear from the research: a helpless response does lead to poorer performance and lower levels of productive results. The point is that helpless students adopt an unreasonable view of themselves in relation to the problem or task before them:

Students prone to the helpless pattern may easily react with self-doubt and disruption, deciding prematurely that they aren't any good in the subject. This would put them at a real disadvantage as school progresses, especially in areas of math and science that really ask the student to enter a new conceptual world.

This study showed that a helpless response could hamper learning of new material in a classroom setting, and made it even more important for us to understand the underlying causes of the helpless and mastery-oriented responses.²

My takeaway is to ask: if bright students become so disheartened and unreasonable, given a perceived challenge, what can we expect of lesser advantaged students? We need to work on conveying the true nature of learning and of academic content to all students. We need to have students see learning, given a particular content, not as something you can or cannot do, but as something you can work on and think about and try different approaches and angles, and enjoy working on. No matter how bright a student is, he or she will meet bewildering challenges eventually and he or she will make mistakes in trying to solve these challenges. What will the reaction be when this eventuality confronts the student? I am aware of an anecdotal case in which a young lady whizzed through her schooling – K through 12 and then four years of college – with practically straight As. She decided to enter a doctoral degree program in clinical psychology. There, she met her match and found herself unable to adjust to the new demands. Her “Waterloo” proved fatal to her academic career. While I don't know all the ins and outs of the case, I can't help believing that she fell into this helpless response mode – she voiced her inability to work in a more problem solving environment. For a more positive result, the student needs to understand that each of us has potential to improve. And also that even if at the moment the solution is not readily achievable – for appropriately gauged material – a student should be able to work it out and, by so doing, improve on his or her intelligence and opportunities.

1Dweck, C. S. (2000). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press, p. 1.

2Ibid., p. 12.