Source: Laboratories of Judith Danovitch and Nicholaus Noles-University of Louisville Imagine teaching two children how to skate. It is a hard task for both of them, and they fall down frequently. After falling down for the first time, one child says that skating is too hard and wants to go home. The other child seems to enjoy the challenge and eagerly gets back up after falling down each time. Why do the children have such different attitudes about the same task? One reason may be that they have different mindsets or beliefs about the nature of their ability. According to psychologist Carol Dweck, some people have a fixed mindset, and some people have a growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence or abilities are fixed and cannot change. When these people face a challenge, like learning how to skate, they tend to believe that if a new skill does not come easily, then they are simply no good at it. They do not see their skills as capable of changing, and thus they decide that it's useless to continue trying. People with a growth mindset have the opposite attitude. They believe that abilities can be developed through hard work, and they continue trying to improve even if they do not initially succeed. How do these different mindsets develop? One factor that influences children's persistence and motivation to succeed is the way their success is described by other people. Specifically, the kind of praise children receive from adults, such as parents and teachers, can have a powerful effect on their subsequent motivation to perform a challenging task. This video demonstrates how to measure the effect of praise on children's motivation based on the methods developed by Mueller and Dweck.1