I saw a link on Metafilter titled “the secret to raising smart kids”, so I was of course interested immediately. It was a great read, and is something that I can identify with in my own rather erratic scholastic career. Basically the idea is that there are two ways kids can think of intelligence; something that is like a talent, fixed and something you either have or you don’t, or you can think of it as something you can develop with hard work, which is therefore limitless.  Kids that have been told they are smart when they do something well (or when they succeed without expending any effort) eventually become averse to hard work and attempting something difficult (which they inevitably run into at some point) because they value looking smart over actually working hard to achieve something. Good marks are similarly valued, instead of actually learning how to work through a problem, regardless of getting the correct answer. 

 This is a fundamental difference of course, and the article refers to some studies that actually support these theories.  They took kids and told some of them that intelligence is something that can be developed like a muscle, and these kids turned their school year around.  They displayed much more persistence and resilience to failure on a hard problem than the rest of their class.  For these kids, failure is a sign of a lack of effort, not because you are dumb.  It’s amazing such a seemingly simple tactic can have such an effect, but there you go.

 I highly recommend the read, it resonated strongly with me.  I definitely walked right through high school with hardly any effort at all and as a result sucked pretty bad when a real challenge came around in university. 

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids