Personal Conceptions of Intelligence Affect Outcome in a Multimedia Reading Training Program

Personal conceptions of intelligence seem to make a significant contribution to overcoming a reading deficit, as indicated in our earlier research. The present aim was to assess improvements in reading-decoding following training of children with reading-decoding problems and different conceptions of intelligence (incremental or entity). It was expected that treatment of children with an incremental representation would improve more. Participants were 20 children (10 girls, 10 boys) whose average age was 8.6 yr., who attended Grade 3 of elementary school, and who were selected from 675 pupils. Children were given a multimedia test to measure motivational factors such as conceptions of intelligence, achievement goals, perception of controllability, and causal attributions. The participants took part in a multimedia training. Posttest evaluations showed more improvement in reading-decoding by children holding an incremental theory of intelligence. The importance of treatment programmes in which account is taken of both specificity of deficits and motivational factors should be explored further as the present sample was very small.