Stanford duck syndrome: How the myth of effortless genius hurts learning

Some kinds of difficulties during learning help to make the learning stronger and better remembered. • When learning is easy, it is often superficial and soon forgotten. • Not all of our intellectual abilities are hardwired. In fact, when learning is effortful, it changes the brain, making new connections and increasing intellectual ability. • You

Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford, has spent decades demonstrating that one of the crucial ingredients of successful education is the ability to learn from mistakes. The same strategy that Robertie uses to excel at games is also an essential pedagogic tool. Unfortunately, children are often taught the exact opposite. Instead of praising kids

Many people think of the brain as a mystery. They don’t know much about intelligence and how it works. When they do think about what intelligence is, many people believe that a person is born either smart, average, or dumb—and stays that way for life. But new research shows that the brain is more like a muscle—it changes and gets stronger when you

In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you’re not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn’t need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.

Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hardwired from birth, and that failure to meet a learning challenge is an indictment of their native ability. But every time you learn something new, you change the brain—the residue of your experiences is stored.

A child with a learning theory of intelligence tends to sense that with hard work, difficult material can be grasped—step by step, incrementally, the novice can become the master.

Dweck’s research has shown that when challenged by difficult material, learning theorists are far more likely to rise to the level of the game, while entity theorists are more brittle and prone to quit.