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Children's Implicit Beliefs About Intelligence, Carly Champagne

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Young children are commonly perceived as highly optimistic and confident, and therefore seldom arouse concern as to how they are impacted by academic failure. However, there is evidence to suggest that young children can indeed be negatively affected by failure experiences. Implicit theories of intelligence can provide individuals with a framework by which to perceive failure, though little is known about when these theories begin to develop. The current study explores whether children as young as three and a half to four years of age demonstrate patterns indicative of incremental or entity theories of intelligence as a response to challenge …