The Effects of Learning on Development (AQA GCSE Psychology): Flashcards

They taught 48 low-achieving 12–13-year-olds that intelligence grows like a muscle. Their motivation and grades improved while a control group’s did not, showing a growth mindset can be taught.

That a growth-mindset programme of under an hour improved the grades of lower-achieving US secondary students.

Both mindsets still depend on praise — praising effort is still praise from someone else, so learners may work to earn approval rather than becoming self-motivated.

It puts the responsibility on the individual, implying that failure is mainly down to the learner’s mindset. This can overlook real obstacles such as poor teaching or difficult home circumstances.

Praise is a positive response to something someone has done — such as a coach praising a swimmer’s best time.

As positive reinforcement: it makes the person feel good, raises their self-esteem, and motivates them to repeat or improve the behaviour.

False.

To work, praise must be honest, sincere and deserved. If everyone is praised regardless of effort, it becomes meaningless.

It teaches the learner that ability is fixed. They may then avoid challenges in case they fail and lose the label — a fixed mindset.

It teaches that ability can grow. The learner is more willing to take on hard tasks and persist — a growth mindset.

Because effort is available to everyone. Seeing someone praised for a performance you cannot match is demotivating.

Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their own ability to succeed at a specific task.

Past experience: success raises it and repeated failure lowers it. What parents, teachers and peers say about our ability also affects it.

People choose tasks they believe they can do, put in more effort, persist longer when it gets hard, and are more resilient after setbacks.

By setting tasks at a level where students can succeed, creating the expectation of further success.

Equal-ability male and female Psychology students sat a maths test. Where the group was told the test had found gender differences, females under-performed males — possibly from lowered self-efficacy due to the stereotype. In the control condition there was no difference.

Dweck (1975) told students their poor results were due to a lack of effort; they later persisted more on hard tasks.

Nursery children who were rewarded for drawing later drew less than unrewarded children — showing that external rewards can replace internal motivation.

False.

The evidence is correlational — doing well may raise self-efficacy rather than the other way round.

Learning styles describe the different ways in which people learn best, according to their individual needs, skills and attributes.

That learning should improve if teaching is matched to a student’s preferred style.

Verbalisers are learners who process and recall information according to how it sounds and how it reads.

Repetition, mnemonics — such as ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’ for the colours of the rainbow — discussion and note-making.

b.

Talking about an idea is a verbaliser strategy. The others all involve the visual learning style.

Visualisers are learners who process and recall information according to how it looks — its shape, colour, layout, size and appearance generally.

Mind maps and mind palaces to process and store information.

False.

Visualisers prefer a graph or diagram. It is verbalisers who prefer a description in text.

Visualisers have a good spatial sense, and like to ‘see’ places and characters in their mind when reading.

It moved teaching away from verbal-only methods, encouraging a more varied mix of words, diagrams and activities — which benefits all learners whether or not ‘matching’ works.

No properly controlled study showing that matching teaching to a student’s style improves performance.

They tested verbalisers and visualisers directly and found no benefit from matched instruction.

They identified 71 different learning-style theories. With so little agreement on what the styles even are, it is unworkable for a teacher to identify and cater for them.

Tailoring every lesson to every style would take enormous time and could make lessons unfocused — and since the evidence says it does not help, that effort is wasted.

There is no evidence that matching teaching to a ‘style’ improves learning. He argues teaching should be based only on well-designed scientific research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Praise should be for effort, not ability, and it works best when it is unexpected.

If a child works hard in order to get praise, the praise becomes an external reward and destroys their own intrinsic motivation — as in Lepper et al. (1973), where children rewarded for drawing later drew less.

Retrieval — the information is still in memory, but we lack the right cue to find it, as in the ‘tip of the tongue’ experience.

That giving people the category name as a cue restored recall of words they had apparently ‘forgotten’.

Learn a cue alongside it, so that the cue can trigger recall later.

False.

Regular testing improves long-term memory more, because it practises retrieval. Students tend to memorise when they should be retrieving.

Self-regulation is the ability to control your own behaviour, emotions and attention. It includes delayed gratification — resisting a small reward now for a bigger reward later.

A child is left alone with a marshmallow and told that if they wait until the researcher returns, they can have two.

That children who had waited longer in the marshmallow test went on to do better at school as teenagers.

Willingham argues self-regulation predicts school success better than learning style, and that it can be taught.

That the pattern of brain waves in children with dyslexia differs from those without it. If such patterns could be identified early, children could get specialist help before they fall behind.

It is evidence-based — every recommendation is drawn from controlled scientific research, unlike learning styles, so the conclusions can be trusted. It also has direct real-world application in classrooms.

Learning difficulties such as dyslexia have many causes, so a diagnosis based on one brain pattern may be wrong — and once a child is labelled, the label tends to stick.

A large replication of the marshmallow test found the link to later success was much weaker once family background was taken into account — so self-regulation effects may be overstated.

It is not a single theory but a collection of separate findings rather than one explanation of learning, which makes it hard to test as a whole.