Thursday, March 31, 2011

How Belief of Limits of Learning Affects Our Learning

"To test this possibility, Miele, Finn, and Molden had people learn to relate English words to Indonesian words with the same meaning.  Some of those words feel quite obvious (Police-Polisi), while others seem totally arbitrary (Bandage-Pembalut).  People studied the words for as long as they wanted and then made judgments of how well they learned the words.  At the end of the study, people did a questionnaire to determine whether they think of intelligence as a talent or a skill.

 In this study, the pairs that seemed easy were in fact much easier to learn than the ones that seemed hard.  The people who believed that intelligence is a talent used that feeling of ease to decide how well they learned the new items.  The people who believe that intelligence is a skill actually showed the opposite effect.  They were actually overconfident that they would later remember the hard items.

 On the surface, it might seem like a bad thing to think that you had done a better job of learning something than you actually did.  However, the people who believed that intelligence is a skill put in more effort on the hard items than on the easy items, while the people who believed that intelligence is a talent put in more effort on the easy items than on the hard items.  As a result, the people who believe that intelligence is a skill learned more overall.

 This result is quite important.  A mountain of evidence suggests that intelligence really is a skill.  That is, the harder you work, the more you learn.  So, when you encounter something difficult, it is better to treat that as a challenge than as a sign that you have reached your mental limits.  By putting in extra effort on difficult concepts, you come away with more knowledge.

 Ultimately, this aspect of learning feeds on itself.  The more you learn at any given time, the easier it is to learn new things in the future.  The effort you put in to learn is rewarded by making it easier for you to learn more things in the future."

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