Improving Children's Learning Abilities Through Interventions Targeting Learning Strategies and Intelligence Beliefs
Résumé
Here we evaluated the impact of crosscutting skills interventions target-ing intelligence beliefs and learning strategies on children’s learn-ing performance. One hundred and twelve children (9-11 years old), participated to a 3-step study composed of a pre-test and 2 one-hour intervention, each one followed by a post-test. Children were ran-domly assigned to either a control group or an experimental group. In the experimental group, the first intervention promoted a mal-leable conception of intelligence and highlighted the importance of effort in skill acquisition (i.e., growth mindset; Yeager et al., 2019). The second intervention taught children about deep learning strate-gies (i.e., mental imagery and self-reference). In contrast, control participants received two interventions about the human body. The results showed that promoting a growth mindset increased the amount of efforts mobilized by the children. It was also shown that promoting deep encoding strategies improved children’s episodic memory per-formance, and especially strategic component. Practical implications for children’s learning at school will be considered.