\u201cWe focused on a widespread cultural belief that equates academic success with a high level of competence and failure with intellectual inferiority,\u201d said Frederique Autin, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Poitiers in Poitiers, France. \u201cBy being obsessed with success, students are afraid to fail, so they are reluctant to take difficult steps to master new material. Acknowledging that difficulty is a crucial part of learning could stop a vicious circle in which difficulty creates feelings of incompetence that in turn disrupts learning<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n The study, published online in APA\u2019s Journal of Experimental Psychology: General<\/em>, could have important implications for teachers, parents and students, said Jean-Claude Croizet, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Poitiers who supervised the research based on Autin\u2019s doctoral dissertation. \u201cPeople usually believe that academic achievement simply reflects students\u2019 inherent academic ability, which can be difficult to change,\u201d Croizet said. \u201cBut teachers and parents may be able to help students succeed just by changing the way in which the material is presented.\u201d<\/p>\n In the first experiment with 111 French sixth graders, students were given very difficult anagram problems that none of them could solve. Then a researcher talked to the students about the difficulty of the problems. One group was told that learning is difficult and failure is common, but practice will help, just like learning how to ride a bicycle. Children in a second group were just asked how they tried to solve the problems. The students then took a test that measures working memory capacity, a key cognitive ability for storing and processing incoming information. Working memory capacity is a good predictor of many aspects of academic achievement, including reading comprehension, problem solving and IQ. The students who were told that learning is difficult performed significantly better on the working memory test, especially on more difficult problems, than the second group or a third control group who took the working memory test without doing the anagrams or discussions with researchers.<\/strong><\/p>\n A second experiment with 131 sixth graders followed a similar procedure with the difficult anagrams and discussions with a researcher. An additional group of students took a simpler anagram test that could be solved, and this group was not told that learning is difficult. All of the students then completed a reading comprehension test. The children who were told that learning is difficult scored higher than the other groups, including the students who had just succeeded on the simple test. How students think about failure may be more important than their own success when learning challenging skills, the study noted.<\/p>\n A third experiment with 68 sixth graders measured reading comprehension and asked questions that measured students\u2019 feelings about their own academic competence. The group that was told that learning is difficult performed better in reading comprehension and reported fewer feelings of incompetence.<\/p>\n The study noted that the students\u2019 improvement on the tests most likely was temporary, but the results showed that working memory capacity may be improved simply by boosting students\u2019 confidence and reducing their fear of failure<\/strong>. \u201cOur research suggests that students will benefit from education that gives them room to struggle with difficulty,\u201d Autin said. \u201cTeachers and parents should emphasize children\u2019s progress rather than focusing solely on grades and test scores. Learning takes time and each step in the process should be rewarded, especially at early stages when students most likely will experience failure.\u201d<\/p>\n The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and is the world’s largest association of psychologists. APA’s membership includes more than 154,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means of promoting health, education and human welfare.<\/p>\n Article: \u201cImproving Working Memory Efficiency by Reframing Metacognitive Interpretation of Task Difficulty,\u201d Frederique Autin, PhD, and Jean-Claude Croizet, PhD, University of Poitiers and the National Center for Scientific Research, Poitiers, France; Journal of Experimental Psychology: General<\/em>, online. From the American Psychological Association press release via Newswise: Children may perform better in school and feel more confident about themselves if they are told that failure is a normal… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,9],"tags":[70,45,140,73,19,12,124],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1819"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1820,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819\/revisions\/1820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Classroom.jpg\" "\\"classroom\\"")
Children may perform better in school and feel more confident about themselves if they are told that failure is a normal part of learning, rather than being pressured to succeed at all costs<\/strong>, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.<\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.apa.org\/pubs\/journals\/releases\/xge-ofp-autin.pdf<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"