The National Teacher Research Panel was set up about 15 years ago by CUREE supported by a group of national education agencies most of which no longer exist. It had three main goals:
- To ensure that all research in education takes account of the teacher perspective
- To ensure a higher profile for research and evidence informed practice in government, academic and practitioner communities
- To increase the number of teachers engaged in and with the full spectrum of research activity.
Over the several years of its existence, the Panel, supported by its expert advisers in CUREE, has helped and encouraged dozens of teachers and school leaders to do high quality but practical research. The Panel also helped them report their findings succinctly, in plain English and focused on relevance to other practitioners. This is one such example of that work.
The study summarised in this TLA research summary focuses on student motivation and achievement and explores how they relate to beliefs that students hold about themselves and about the nature of ability. The book, summarised in Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development (Dweck 2000), aimed to explore why some young people exceed expectations and others fail to fulfil their potential.Carol Dweck has spent over thirty years researching how learners responded to experiences of difficulty and challenge. She and her colleagues consistently found that, when pupils met difficulties and setbacks in their work, some responded by tackling the challenges with determination, whilst others quickly gave up. The two groups of students showed strikingly different ways of talking to themselves during a challenge. They also held different beliefs about the nature of ability or intelligence and the value of effort.Dweck's experiments explored:
the relationship between learners' beliefs about the nature of intelligence and their behaviour on challenging tasks
whether learners' beliefs about the nature of ability could be changed and the effect of changing such beliefs on their
persistence in the face of difficulties
whether experiences of success increased learners' desire for challenge and extended their ability to cope with setbacks
the possible roots of vulnerability in young children
the effects of different types of praise and criticism
the social effects of a belief in fixed traits.
Her work prompts and guides reflection on the value of practices such as offering praise for ability and achievement, or labelling students as having a particular level of ability. The findings also lend support to the use of teaching and learning initiatives that develop learners' skills in their conscious use of problem-solving strategies, promote a shared understanding of quality during formative assessment and develop resilient attitudes amongst learners.
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