Individual Differences in Perceived Effort Source Influence Students' Judgments of Ability

• In Event: 16.061 - Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: 16.061-5 - Extending Mindset Research: Implicit Beliefs of Teachers and Students in Diverse Contexts

Abstract

elicited by the subjective difficulty of tasks (i.e., task-elicited) or as the result of one’s motivation to surpass the minimal demands of the task (i.e., self-initiated) affects the way they thinks about the relation between effort and ability. Across two studies, participants who tended to think in terms of task-elicited effort judged students who worked hard on a math task as having less ability than students who did not work hard (i.e., thought in terms of a negative relation between effort and ability). In contrast, participants who tended to think in terms of self-initiated effort judged students who worked hard as having the same level of ability.

Authors

• David B. Miele, Boston College

• Marina Vasilyeva, Boston College

• Chen Shen, Boston College

• Katherine Marie Muenks, Indiana University - Bloomington