10 - Beliefs about intelligence - Giftedness and Mindsets Flashcards
Introduction / Definition
Giftedness:
* An intellectual ability significantly higher than average.
* A developmental process : starts at birth and continues throughout life
* NOT a marker of success, but rather an aptitude / inherent ability to learn.
Giftedness is a term used to describe individuals who show or have a potential for showing an exceptional level of performance in one or more of the following areas:
General intellectual ability
Specific academic aptitude
Creative thinking
Leadership ability
Visual or performing arts
- Statistically rare
- 3% to 5% of the population (recommendations by Renzulli 2018)
- Some says 10% (Gagne, 2018)
- In IQ terms, the general rules are :
- IQ 130 -145 ~ “gifted”
- IQ 145 + ~ “highly gifted”
- Careful IQ scores ≠ everything !
- Careful with focusing too much on the numbers!
- Clinical judgement is ESSENTIAL
- The evaluation is clinical, not ONLY psychometric
WHY DO WE TALK ABOUT THIS TODAY?
- To understand your client’s experience of the world : Gifted
children and adults often experience the world differently, resulting in unique social and emotional issues - Also, gifted children and adults often develop asynchronously:
different aspects of the self are at different stages of
development - Mind ahead of physical growth?
- Mind ahead of specific cognitive growth?
- Mind ahead of emotional functions?
BEHAVIORAL CHARACTERISTICS
□ Highly developed curiosity
□ Limitless questions (≠ ODD… oppositional defiance disorder)
□ Interested in challenges and discovery
□ Proactively curious
□ Longer attention span and persistence on subjects of interest
□ Intensity, sensitivity and overexcitabilities (details in a few slides)
□ Divergent thinking and a tendency to put ideas or things together in unusual,not obvious and creative ways
□ Feeling intensely different from peers (differential Dx essential)
□ Intolerance to perception of injustice (idealism)
□ Unusual sense of humour
RISK FACTORS THAT MAY INCREASE
CHANCES OF SOCIAL & EMOTIONAL
DIFFICULTIES
o Different rates or levels of physical and emotional
development
o Drive to use one’s abilities
o Drive to understand and search for consistency
o Ability to see possibilities and alternatives
o Emotional intensity
o Concerns with social and moral issues
(SOME) THEORETICAL
MODELS
GIFTED – ACCORDING TO
STERNBERG
* Excellent in a domain
* Rare in the general population
* This difference can be measured
* Able to create something unique with this
potential
* The accomplishments of this person has a value for society
GIFTED – ACCORDING TO FRANCOIS GAGNE (UQAM)
See model!!! slide 15
GIFTED – ACCORDING TO RENZULLI
3 components interacting :
* Ability
* Creativity
* Commitment
2 types of gifted children:
* High academic potential
* High creative potential
GIFTED – ACCORDING TO
DABROWSKI
* Kazimierz Dabrowski’s original concept of
developmental potential, which he defined as a genetic endowment of traits that determine what level of moral development a person may reach under ideal circumstances.
Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration
INTENSITY/SENSITIVITY/ OVEREXCITABILITIES
Intellectual overexcitability
* The hallmarks of intellectual overexcitability: Curiosity, asking
probing questions, concentration, problem solving, and
introspection.
* These individuals have incredibly active minds and seek knowledge.
* They are independent thinkers and keen observers who may
become impatient if others do not share their excitement about
an idea.
Imaginational Overexcitabilitiy
* Rich imagination, fantasy play, daydreaming, dramatic
perception
* Adults are often dramatic in their interactions with others and they may appear spaced out.
Emotional overexcitability
* Heightened sensitivity.
* They form strong emotional attachment to people or things
* Often have difficulty adjusting to new situations and are often accused of overreacting.
* Children and adults may become quite disillusioned, cynical, angry or depressed when they discover that their idealism is not shared by others.
- Psychomotor Overexcitability
Show a surplus of energy that is often manifested in rapid speech,
intense enthusiasm, intense physical activity and a need for
action.
High potential of being misdiagnosed with ADHD; Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.
Sensory Overexcitability
* Sensory aspects of everyday life: seeing, smelling, tasting,
touching and hearing are more heightened than others.
* Some children and adults may attempt to avoid or minimize certain settings of overstimulation.
* High potential of being misdiagnosed with ADS; Autism Spectrum Disorder
Now, some clarifications / reminders …
IQ: Scores on a psychometric test, a standardized and normed test
Talent: Achievement, larger than academic achievement.A potential being used and nurtured could lead to achievement / accomplishments / performance
Academic achievement: Grades and awards
Giftedness: Dynamic and heteroclite developmental process. Potential + engagement to developing one’s own
talent
ASYNCHRONOUS DEVELOPMENT
Giftedness may be associated with persistent difficulties in
adaptation and functioning because of the gap between the intellectual development of gifted people and the
other spheres of their development (emotional, social, academic, etc.)
Gifted children may experience a difference between their intellectual and their
1. emotional development (immature and contradictory behaviors with their intellectual abilities, anxiety, frustration, etc.)
2. psychomotor development (clumsy, difficult to write, very skillful in certain tasks and not in others, etc.)
3. attentional development (attentive if stimulated, but below his intellectual potential, distracted, disorganized, lack of concentration, etc.)
4. academic or professional achievement (boredom, difficulty learning,
distraction when little stimulation, highly variable results, underperformance, etc.)
5. social functioning (difficulty to relate to others, to understand the limits, social norms and the framework of the average person, isolation, feeling of
misunderstanding, etc.)
PROFILES OF GIFTEDNESS
HOMOGENEOUS
harmonious cognitive development and a great facility to learn.
* The majority of these children are quite successful in adapting.
* They generally work well in school, but can be bored and experience anxiety as well as social difficulties (e.g., isolation ,feeling of being misunderstood).
* Some may be quite sensitive to the expectations of others
HETEROGENEOUS
(also called “complex”): great disparities between their different cognitive abilities, which can reflect learning disabilities, motor disorders or language disorders that can even mask giftedness.
* This profile is characterized by a brain that “constantly thinks”, a great intuitive creativity and an analog thinking that makes planning very difficult.
* Often unconventional and hypersensitive.
* Highly variable academic success (success to failure).
TWICE-EXCEPTIONAL
“Exceptional ability and disability”
1. Their ability may be more noticeable, hiding their disability.
2. Their disability may be more noticeable, hiding there exceptional ability.
3. Each may mask the other so that neither is recognized nor addressed.
-GIFTEDNESS + LEARNING DISABILITY
* The main learning disability present in gifted children are phonological
dyslexia-dysorthographia and dyspraxia (clumsiness, motor coordination disorder, illegible handwriting).
* German researchers have shown that the superior memory (visual and verbal) and the more advanced vocabulary of gifted children very often hide the
presence of dyslexia.
-GIFTEDNESS + AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER
* Several authors indicate an overlap in the characteristics of children
with ASD and gifted children
(especially those with
heterogeneous profile).
* Particularly the case for those who
have non-verbal skills that are
superior to their verbal skills, but
also those with a high IQ (≥145).
* Children with ASD and gifted children often share the following characteristics
- Social skills that seem limited, social
withdrawal;
- Poor understanding of the rules of social communication;
- Particular sense of humor;
- Excessive perfectionism, concern for
details;
- Sensory hypersensitivity
-GIFTEDNESS + ADHD
* ADHD is the most common diagnosis in gifted children.
* US experts estimate that about 50% of gifted children who are diagnosed with ADHD do actually meet all criteria of ADHD. (but they don’t meet criteria E)
* Why?
- Some authors suggest it is because many psychologists and neuropsychologists who evaluate ADHD believe that giftedness is only IQ ≥ 130.
- ADHD & HP behaviors can be very similar. - Planning difficulties and inattentive
behaviors can be misinterpreted
* Gifted children without ADHD are generally able to be attentive and successful in school, but they become inattentive, agitated, and impulsive when not sufficiently stimulated.
* Gifted children with ADHD may be more
“hyperactive” than the typical ADHD because they get bored quicker + they are impulsive
- They can be demanding ∕ challenging
* They often struggle dealing with failure because they lack control over their performance
- performance is often very variable and considered below their intellectual abilities
* The lack of inhibition may lead to a more intense in their emotional lives, in their actions and in their fields of interest.
INTERVENTIONS FOR THE GIFTED
LEARNERS
providing validation of students’ social and emotional struggle and offering appropriate support,
using bibliotherapy and cinematherapy to help gifted students find role models in the media,
teaching coping strategies such as calming techniques,
offering social skills training to those who need it,
enrolling students in summer and out-of-school gifted programs that have peers with similar abilities and interests,
seeking professionals who have experience working with the social and emotional needs of the gifted,
helping students learn creative problem-solving skills to tackle their challenges,
presenting appropriate modeling on how to cope with life’s challenges and setbacks
teaching mood management skills for coping with troubling feelings
ELITISM
- Elitism is the belief that a select few are superior to others.
- Early work on giftedness assumed that giftedness, creativity, and talent were innate and permanent. historic emphasis was on genetic superiority
- Intelligence is not as unidimensional or as fixed at birth as was earlier assumed
- Ability is incrementally developed, built on effort, practice, and persistence, along with attitudes of problem finding and problem solving
- Recommendation :
- Diminish the use of the term “gifted,” “creative,” or “talented”
- Rather, refer to “differences in developmental trajectories”
Beliefs about
intelligence
- Intelligence is viewed as
- golden ticket to success
- a “gift”
- innate attribute
- stable
- Cultural context
- more present in western cultures
- The relatively high stability of test
performance on IQ tests and the positive
manifold has led many to assume this view of intelligence as fixed.
IMPLICATIONS
These perceptions of intelligence have
1. shaped our educational system
2. encouraged self-fulfilling prophecies
* Someone’s implicit belief about intelligence will influence the learning opportunities they pursue, the effort they will invest, and their resulting
growth
Carol Dweck’s Mindset theory
- Professor of Psychology, Stanford University
- Interested in the foundation of motivation
- Famous for her work on Implicit beliefs about intelligence (mindsets): beliefs about the capacity to grow one’s abilities
Mindsets = beliefs about the capacity to grow one’s abilities
Growth
* intelligence is a changeable, malleable attribute
* can be developed through effort
* Skills can be learned
Fixed
* intelligence is inborn
* uncontrollable trait
* You are gifted or not
Fixed Mindset
* Intelligence is fixed, uncontrollable.
* Things come easily if you are smart
* Effort is a sign of low ability and relatively ineffective at overcoming it.
- “If you’re not good at a subject, working hard won’t make you good at it,”
- “When I work hard at something, it makes me feel like I’m not very smart.”
* Primary goal is to perform well, to appear smart, or avoid looking dumb.
* Also because failure suggests one’s ability is inadequate, it reflects poorly on the individual and pushes the individuals to want to protect/defend against the threat of incompetence (i.e. becomes defensive)
* When facing setback or failure, they are likely to attribute it to low ability rather than effort (e.g., Henderson and Dweck 1990 ), doubt their ability to recover.
* Susceptible to loss of confidence and easily give up when encountering challenges
* “Helpless” response when facing failure, give up instead of risking further exposition to being unintelligent or untalented (e.g., Robins and Pals 2002).
Growth Mindset
The implicit premises:
* Intelligence can be cultivated
* Belief in the power of effort
* Intelligence is a malleable quality
* This mindset is often associated with a Mastery-oriented approach to tasks:
- Individuals with this mindset are often more focused on learning goals
- This may increase ability in return - even if it requires effort, struggle, and errors along the way (Dweck 1999; Dweck and Leggett
1988)
When they experience setbacks.. they tend to show persistence in the face of adversity
- They tend to attribute setbacks to lack of sufficient effort and, in turn, adopt a mastery- oriented
approach, increasing their effort and taking on new study strategies (e.g., Robins and Pals 2002)
- They tend to view obstacles as setbacks and not as indicators of inadequacy. The appropriate effort or strategy was not employed – not a threat to the person.
“When something is hard, it just makes me want to work more on it, not less.”
- Interestingly, the significance of an individual’s mindset may not emerge until he/she faces challenges
*See Dweck (model slide 11)
TESTING THE THEORY…
- Math skills are generally views as fixed
- They assessed the mindset of high achieving students (N= 373) entering Junior
Highschool (NY public school) and tracked their math grades for 2 years. - Assessed the students’ mindset with a Likert scale:
“You have a certain amount of intelligence, and you really can’t do much to change it” “You can learn new things, but you can’t really change your basic intelligence” - Results: 2 years later, those endorsing a strong growth mindset outperformed those who had a fixed mindset (controlling for prior achievement)
Mindsets influences Achievements
* Longitudinal study
* In 6th grade (less challenging setting) all children had similar math skills
* Assessed mindset at beginning of 7thgrade
* The 2 “groups” began to pull apart at end of first term, the gap widened over the next two years
The authors interpretation :
- the beliefs, goals, and attitudes that led to different patterns of behavior were responsible for the diverging trajectories of grades.
- the way people think about their intelligence can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, expanding or limiting their motivation, growth, achievement, and, ultimately, their ability.
Paying attention to error : A difference
between growth and fixed mindset ?
Reminder : students with a fixed
mindset often hold a performance focus in which they are particularly concerned with the goal of proving their abilities and achieving highly, especially in comparison to others, whereas those with a growth mindset typically endorse goals of learning and mastery (Blackwell et al. 2007; Dweck and Leggett 1988; Dweck
1999 ).
Paying attention to error?
ERP studies
Moser et al 2011
* With a growth mindset you are more likely to attend to errors → more likely to
improve accuracy on next trials of a task.
* People with a growth mindset were more successful at reorienting their
attention to the task at hand
- They were not discouraged by errors
- Rather, they responded in an adaptive way that allowed them to persist and improve.
Mangels et al. 2006
* Fixed mindset are more “attentive” when given accuracy feedback.
* However, don’t learn from their mistakes as much as expected
- when given the correct answer, the quality of their processing seems to be lower and does not help correcting their learning when given a later surprise test
Practical Applications
A workshop Intervention
Can teaching 7th graders that intelligence is malleable have an effect on their motivation in class or on their grades?
Blackwell et al 2007
* 91 low-achieving students were split in 2 groups for 8 weeks : 25min session 1/week
* Group 1 (intervention group)
taught
intelligence is malleable and that learning changes the brain. The brain is a muscle. Mistakes are necessary! Being smart is a choice!
* Group 2 (control group)
taught study skills
* Results: Group 2 continued to experience
decline in grades (control group).
* Group 1 initial declining grades was reverse : their average math grades improved within a few months of the intervention!
Results:
* The math grades of the
students in the growth mindset
workshop group rebounded!
* 75% of the students who
improved in motivation were
from the mindset workshop
group (vs. the skill workshop
group)
The effect of praise
Mueller & Dweck 1998
* Task 1 = Students are given Raven matrices
* RCT into Δ feedback conditions
- Group1:“Wow, that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this” (intelligence praise condition).
- Group 2: “Wow, that’s a really good score. You must have worked hard at this” (effort/process praise condition)
- Group 3: no praise (control condition)
* Task 2 = children asked which puzzle they want to try (easy one or hard ones)
* Easy puzzles are like they just did. Hard puzzles would help them learn more
* Results :
* Children praised for intelligence chose to repeat the same easy puzzles!
* While the children praised for process largely chose the more difficult ones.
- In another phase of the study,
- T2, the researchers had the students work on more difficult puzzles, on which all the students struggled.
- All students were challenged at T2
- T3 = last sets of Raven matrices, same level of difficulty as T1.
- The children with in the no praise condition show slight increase in
performance over time. (small practice effect?) - The children in the intelligence praise, showed a decrease from T1 to T3 on Raven matrices.
- Did the “fixed mindset praise” triggered helplessness making children
perform worst?
