Achievement 211
time they spend with children, and the attributions they
make for performance.
■ Parents’ communications influence children’s ability
perceptions and, ultimately, children’s performance.
The Influence of Teachers
Teachers can influence children’s beliefs
about their abilities by the attention and in-
struction they provide to students and by the
nature of the feedback they provide about
performance. Some of these effects are due
to the stereotypes the teachers, themselves,
hold. For example, one study showed that
teachers believed a gymnast would perform
better after 10 weeks of training when told
the video that they had viewed was a male
rather than a female (Chalabaev et al., 2009).
Teachers’ stereotypes that males have more
athletic ability than females appear to extend
to a female sex-typed domain.
Attention. In 1994, Sadker and Sadker
published a book titledFailingatFairness:How
children’s perceptions and the children’s ac-
tual abilities when parents believe that ability is
fixed and not malleable. Pomerantz and Dong
(2006) refer to the fixed view of competence
asentity theory, which is much like Dweck’s
fixed mindset described in Sidebar 6.1. Self-
fulfilling prophecies are more likely to occur
when parents endorse the entity theory of
competence. In a longitudinal study of fourth
through sixth graders, mothers’ perceptions
of children’s competence predicted changes in
children’s perceptions of competence one year
later and changes in children’s grades one year
later—only among mothers who subscribed to
the entity theory of competence.
TAKE HOME POINTS
■ Parents have stereotypes that boys are better than girls
in math and girls are better than boys in verbal abilities,
regardless of actual school performance.
■ Parents communicate these stereotypes to children by
the activities they encourage, the toys they buy, the
FIGURE 6.12 A model describing how parents’ beliefs can influence children’s performance.
Child
Participation
in
Activity
Child
Perception
of Own
Competence
Child
Competence
Parents’
Stereotypes
(category-
based
expectations)
Parents’
Attributions for
Child
Performance
Parents’
Beliefs About
Child’s
Competence
(target-based
expectancies)
- Emotional
Reactions - Interest
- Time with
Child - Provision
of Toys/
Opportunities - Praise
- Direct
Advice
About
Pursuits
Parents’:
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