ya gotta believe
“Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”
(fabricated quotation often attributed to Ghandi)
In 2009, Dr. Akira Miyaki discovered that, if he began a semester of his introductory physics class by making his students write two fifteen-minute essays on their most important personal values, his female students performed as well as the males throughout the semester, both on class exams and on the standardized Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation. Typically, women perform slightly worse on both. A colleague of his discovered similar outcomes applying the same technique with black high school students.
A few years ago, psychologist Dr. Charisse Nixon conducted an experiment in multiple American high school classes where she handed out a card to every student. Each card had three words on it, and the students were asked to anagram all three into other legal words. There was a catch: half the class got two easy words and a moderately-hard third word, while the other half got two words that were impossible to anagram, plus the same third word as the other students. Many students in the first group solved the final word. Practically none in the second did.
More recently, Drs. Frédérique Autin and Jean-Claude Croizet studied French sixth-graders in a more expanded way. The researchers split 131 students into four groups. One group was asked to solve a set of anagrams that was deliberately too hard to solve in time. The second group was given the same too-hard anagrams but counseled afterward that learning is difficult, that failure is common, and that practice helps. The third group was given easy anagrams and no counseling. The fourth group had no preliminaries. Next, all groups were given identical reading comprehension tests. The group that did easy anagrams performed better than the group that got tough ones but no pep talk, but the group with tough anagrams plus encouragement scored higher still. (The group that took the test directly scored in the middle, virtually identical to the easy-anagram group.)