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Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, 3304 Benjamin Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20782, USA
Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology Department, 239E Campion Hall, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 5 June 2014
Received in revised form 6 May 2015
Accepted 30 August 2015
Available online 28 October 2015
Editor: Kimberly Anne Schonert-Reichl
Keywords:
Parents
Beliefs
Ability
Questionnaire
Motivation
a b s t r a c t
The present studies examined whether parents' beliefs about the xedness of ability predict their self-reported
interactions with their children. Parents' xedness beliefs were measured at two levels of specicity: their general beliefs about intelligence and their beliefs about their children's math and verbal abilities. Study 1, conducted
with an online sample of 300 parents, showed that the more parents believed that abilities were xed, the more
likely they were to endorse controlling and performance-oriented behaviors and the less likely they were to endorse autonomy-supportive and mastery-oriented behaviors. Study 2, conducted with 86 parents from a university database, partially replicated the results of Study 1 and also showed that parents' beliefs predicted the selfreported frequency with which they engaged in math- and reading-related activities with their children at home.
Specically, the more parents believed that abilities were xed, the less frequently they reported engaging in
math- and reading-related activities.
2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Prior to formal schooling, parents play a critical role in the development of their children's foundational math and literacy skills by providing them with opportunities to learn in their early home environment.
However, parents vary widely in the amount and type of math- and
reading-related activities they engage in with their children at home
(Baker & Scher, 2002; LeFevre et al., 2009). They also vary in the quality
of their interactions during these activities. At times parents may emphasize learning and mastery of skills, while other times they may
focus on improving their children's performance. In addition, sometimes parents act in ways that promote their children's autonomy,
while other times they attempt to control their children's behavior
(Pomerantz, Moorman, & Litwack, 2007). Both the quantity and quality
of parentchild interactions have important implications for children's
motivation and achievement in school (Pomerantz et al., 2007).
Given that the quality of parents' interactions inuences the development of children's skills and motivation, it is important to examine
factors that may underlie differences in parents' behavior. One potential
factor is parents' beliefs about the xedness or malleability of their
children's abilities (i.e., whether they believe that their children's
abilities are innate and stable over time, or can be improved through
effort and practice). Although these beliefs have been successfully
Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 301 405 2825; fax: +1 301 405 2891.
E-mail addresses: kmuenks@umd.edu (K. Muenks), d.miele@bc.edu (D.B. Miele),
gramani@umd.edu (G.B. Ramani), lstaplet@umd.edu (L.M. Stapleton), mrowe@umd.edu
(M.L. Rowe).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2015.08.002
0193-3973/ 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
79
80
Study 1
Study 1 addressed our rst aim. Parents were recruited online and
asked to complete a series of questionnaires measuring their specic beliefs about the xedness of their children's math and verbal abilities and
their general beliefs about the xedness of intelligence. After they completed these questionnaires, the parents read two scenarios in which
they were asked to imagine their child (as a preschooler) struggling to
complete a difcult math or reading task. They were then presented
with a list of mastery- and performance-oriented behaviors and asked
to say how likely they would be to engage in each of them.
We predicted that parents hold domain-specic beliefs about the
xedness of their children's abilities and that these beliefs would better
predict the types of behaviors they engage in when helping their children during difcult academic tasks than their general xedness beliefs.
More specically, we expected that the more parents believed their
children's math and verbal abilities are xed, the more likely they
would be to report engaging in performance-oriented behaviors and
the less likely they would report engaging in mastery-oriented behaviors during challenging tasks in those domains.
Method
Participants
Three hundred and eleven parents participated in the study through
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a website that is accessed and used
by a large, diverse population of adults from around the world. Individuals who are interested in joining MTurk can register as workers who
receive small payments for their participation in various surveys, experiments, or other tasks (see Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011). Recent
research suggests that the internal consistency of self-reported demographics on MTurk is high, evidenced by the fact that the same workers
gave the same demographic information across multiple studies
(Mason & Suri, 2012). Additionally, replication studies indicate that
MTurk participants display a similar level of consistency across selfreport surveys as is typically seen in non-Internet studies (Buhrmester
et al., 2011; Rand, 2012). For this study, we recruited workers from
the United States and paid them $0.75 to participate. We advertised
our online questionnaire with a short paragraph on the MTurk website.
Eleven parents were excluded from the analysis because they failed to
complete the rst questionnaire, gave nonsense responses to openended reliability check items, or reported that they had participated in
a previous version of the study. The nal sample consisted of 300 parents (65% female) who ranged in age from 19 to 75 years (M = 36.18,
SD = 10.95), and were primarily European American (78.5%; 7.8%
African American; 5.1% Asian American; 4.1% Hispanic; 4.5% other ethnicities). Forty-ve percent of parents had at least a four-year bachelor's
degree, and 41% of parents had a current household income above
$50,000 per year. Most parents (79%) had only one or two children.
Parents were asked to think about only one of their children when completing the survey; 60% of parents thought about a male child and 40%
thought about a female child. The age of the child that parents thought
about ranged from 1 to 47 years at the time of the survey, with a mean
age of 10.13 years (SD = 8.33) and a median age of 8 years. 28.5% of parents thought about a child who was preschool aged, 39.4% thought about
a child who was elementary school aged, 8.8% thought about a child who
was middle school aged, 9.6% thought about a child who was high school
aged, 10% thought about a child who was between 18 and 30 years of
age, and 3.1% thought about a child who was over 30 years of age.
Measures
Specic ability xedness beliefs
Because no existing instruments measured parents' specic beliefs
about the xedness of their children's math and verbal abilities, we
81
Table 1
Means and standard deviations of PBAF items.
Study 1
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Study 2
Math
Verbal
Math
Verbal
2.27 (1.16)
2.01 (1.07)
2.25 (1.16)
2.14 (1.09)
2.98 (1.50)
2.19 (1.29)
2.09 (1.07)
1.84 (.97)
2.32 (1.25)
2.17 (1.08)
2.90 (1.51)
2.28 (1.38)
2.12 (1.05)
1.92 (1.02)
1.86 (.86)
2.06 (1.02)
2.42 (1.01)
1.72 (.88)
1.95 (.96)
1.77 (.94)
1.97 (.79)
1.98 (.91)
2.48 (1.18)
1.91 (.94)
82
give hints about the problem without actually solving the problem;
= .76 math, = .72 reading) and eight performance-oriented
and controlling behaviors (e.g., Tell your child the correct answer;
= .82 math, = .77 reading); mastery- and performance-oriented
behaviors were presented together in a random order (see online supplementary materials for the full list of behaviors). Parents then indicated how likely they would be to engage in each behavior on a 6-point
Likert-type scale (1 = Very Unlikely to 6 = Very Likely). The
rst and second author created the hypothetical scenarios and list
of behaviors based on previous literature (e.g., Reeve & Jang, 2006)
and expert opinion.2 Items were averaged to calculate participants'
scores.
Demographics
Parents reported on a number of demographic variables, including
their gender (heretofore referred to as sex), ethnicity, age, education,
income, and number of children. Education was measured as the
highest level of education completed, from 1 = Grammar school to
7 = Professional degree (PhD, MD, JD, etc.). Income was measured
as the current household income in U.S. dollars, from 1 = Under
$10,000 to 9 = Over $150,000.
Procedure
Prospective participants were rst asked whether or not they were a
parent, and were only allowed to proceed to the main survey once they
conrmed that they were. Parents then lled out a series of online questionnaires that were administered using Qualtrics Research Suite. For
the questionnaires that were child-specic, parents with multiple
children were asked to think about one particular child. They rst
completed Dweck's domain-general TOI Scale and then completed the
domain-specic PBAF in domain 1 (e.g., math), the PBAF in domain 2
(e.g., verbal), the competence questionnaire in domain 1, the competence questionnaire in domain 2, hypothetical scenarios for domain 1,
and then hypothetical scenarios for domain 2. The order of domain presentation was counterbalanced across participants. With the exception
of Dweck's TOI Scale, the order of the items within each questionnaire
was randomized. Parents were asked to report on demographic information at the end of the study.
Results
Factor structure
Because the PBAF is a new measure, we rst evaluated its structural
validity. Conrmatory factor analyses using LISREL 8.80 were conducted
on the items to determine which of the a priori hypothesized models
(based on our previous exploratory studies) best t the data. We used
listwise deletion because the missing data rate for these 12 items was
extremely small (0.01%). Three indices were used to evaluate the t of
the models: the comparative t index (CFI), the standardized root
mean square residual (SRMR), and the root mean square error of
approximation (RMSEA). To retain the hypothesized model, Hu and
Bentler (1999) recommend that the CFI should be above .95, the
SRMR should be below .08, and the RMSEA should be below .06.
Two competing models were tested in order to determine whether
parents held domain-specic beliefs about the xedness of their
children's abilities: a one-factor model where all items in both domains
loaded onto one factor, and a two-factor model where items loaded
onto separate math and verbal factors (see Figure S1, included in the
online supplementary materials). Since the math and verbal items had
the same wording, we covaried the errors between similarly worded
items in both models. The two-factor model t adequately well to the
2
In Studies 1 and 2, parents were also asked which behaviors they would be most and
least likely to use, but analyses pertaining to those items are not reported here.
Discussion
Table 2
Means and standard deviations of all composite variables.
Study 1
PBAF
Child competence
Mastery behaviors
Performance behaviors
Parental efcacy
Parenting activities
Dweck's TOI scale
83
Study 2
Math
Reading
Math
Reading
2.31 (0.92)
4.73 (1.35)
5.12 (0.70)
1.99 (0.78)
3.06 (1.16)
2.27 (0.92)
5.31 (1.45)
5.16 (0.72)
2.17 (0.75)
2.02 (0.76)
5.24 (1.03)
5.08 (0.57)
1.95 (0.75)
4.63 (0.69)
3.25 (1.00)
3.01 (1.10)
2.01 (0.73)
5.51 (1.43)
5.05 (0.61)
1.98 (0.60)
5.00 (0.74)
4.14 (0.90)
(TOI) scores in the second model, and both PBAF and TOI scores simultaneously in the third model. Analyses of self-reported behavior used
listwise deletion to deal with missing data (0.92%), which is reected
in the degrees of freedom for various analyses. As shown in Table 4a,
the two PBAF subscales (math and verbal), as well as the TOI scale, signicantly predicted self-reported parenting behavior for all combinations of behavior type and domain. Specically, parents' xedness
beliefs were negatively related to mastery-oriented behaviors and positively related to performance-oriented behaviors. Furthermore, when
PBAF and TOI scores were entered into the same model simultaneously,
only the PBAF scores remained a signicant predictor of self-reported
parenting behavior. This, in conjunction with the greater R2 for Model
1 compared to Model 2, suggests that parents' child- and domainspecic xedness beliefs accounted for a greater proportion of the variance in self-reported parenting behavior than general xedness beliefs.3
Although the PBAF predicted self-reported parenting behavior within
each domain (i.e., math and reading), it also predicted parenting behavior in the other domain as well. That is, the PBAF-Math signicantly predicted both mastery-oriented, = .43, t(293) = 8.06, p b .001,
and performance-oriented, = .35, t(293) = 6.46, p b .001, behavior
in the reading domain, and the PBAF-Verbal signicantly predicted
both the mastery-oriented, = .44, t(293) = 8.36, p b .001, and
performance-oriented, = .45, t(293) = 8.68, p b .001, behavior in
the math domain. This nding suggests that even though parents may
hold separate beliefs about the xedness of their children's math and verbal abilities, it is the shared variance of these beliefs that predicts selfreported parenting behavior in both domains (see General Discussion).
Study 2
Sex, SES, and age analyses
There were no signicant differences on any measures between parents of boys and girls. There were also no signicant differences between
mothers and fathers on their PBAF scores for math or verbal. However,
there were parent sex differences in self-reported parenting behavior;
mothers were more likely to engage in mastery-oriented behavior,
t(292) = 2.26, p = .03, d = .26 [math], t(292) = 2.60, p =
.01, d = .30 [reading], and less likely to endorse performance behavior, t(292) = 3.12, p = .002, d = .37 [math], t(292) = 2.60, p = .01,
d = .30 [reading], than fathers in both domains. However, sex did not
moderate the relation between PBAF and parenting behavior.
Parent education, transformed into an ordinal variable as years of
education, was negatively related to use of mastery-oriented behavior
in the math domain (rs = .13, p = .02), but was not signicantly
related to any other variables. Parent income and child age were not
related to any variables included in these analyses.4
3
We also conducted these analyses with parent sex, child sex, child age, parent education, and parent income entered as covariates into each model. The addition of the covariates did not change the signicance of the TOI and PBAF as predictors.
4
We also examined moderation effects of age for Studies 1 and 2. Although some interaction terms were statistically signicant, the overall pattern of results did not change.
Some effects just tended to be stronger for parents of older or younger children (depending on the outcome).
84
Table 3a
Correlations of all variablesStudy 1.
1. TOI
2. PBAF Math
3. PBAF Verbal
4. Comp Math
5. Comp Read
6. Mastery Math
7. Mastery Read
8. Perf Math
9. Perf Read
.50**
.45**
.06
.07
.27**
.24**
.19**
.19**
.72**
.13*
.04
.45**
.42**
.43**
.35**
.08
.07
.44**
.42**
.45**
.47**
.36**
.10
.09
.09
.08
.17**
.18**
.16**
.20**
.79**
.39**
.36**
.45**
.44**
.80**
The nal aim of Study 2 was to examine parental efcacy as a potential mediator of the relation between xedness beliefs and parenting behavior. We predict that the less parents believe that their children's
ability in a particular domain is xed, the more they will think of themselves as capable of helping their child to learn and perform well in this
domain (i.e., the higher their parental efcacy) and, thus, the more likely they will be to engage in mastery-oriented parenting behavior and
the less likely they will be to engage in performance-oriented behavior.
Furthermore, parents with low xedness beliefs and high parental efcacy should be relatively likely to participate in math- and readingrelated activities with their children at home.
Method
included one parent of a 4-year old child and one parent of a 14-year
old child. Thus, the age of the child parents thought about ranged
from 4 to 14 years at the time of the survey, with a mean age of 8.12
years (SD = 1.45) and a median age of 8 years, with 1.2% of parents
thinking about a child who was preschool aged, 95.4% thinking about
a child who was elementary school aged, and 3.5% thinking about a
child who was middle school aged.
Measures
The measures were the same as in Study 1 with the addition of a
questionnaire measuring parental efcacy and an inventory that measured how frequently parents did math- and reading-related activities
with their children.
Participants
One hundred and nine parents were recruited from a large database
housed at a mid-Atlantic university. The database consists of thousands
of local families who have volunteered to be contacted to participate in
research studies with their children. For the present study, we recruited
parents of children ages 612 years through email. We did not recruit
parents of children under the age of 6 because it conicted with recruitment of another study we were conducting. We asked parents to ll out
an online questionnaire at home on their computer. Of the 109 parents
who initially participated, 23 were excluded from the analysis because
they failed to complete the rst questionnaire or gave nonsense responses to open-ended reliability check items. The nal sample thus
consisted of 86 parents (94.2% female). Parents ranged in age from 26
to 50 years (M = 41.0), and were primarily European American
(67.4%; 23.3% African American; 2.3% Asian American; 3.5% Hispanic;
3.5% other ethnicities). Eighty eight percent of parents had at least a
four-year bachelor's degree, and 79.1% of parents had a current household income above $50,000 per year. Most parents (79.1%) had only
one or two children. Parents were asked to think about only one of
their children when completing the survey; 54.7% of parents thought
about a male child and 45.3% thought about a female child. Although
we sought to recruit parents of children ages 612 years, we also
Parental efcacy
Parents reported on how efcacious they felt helping their children
learn math and reading. They were given ve items per domain and
asked to indicate their agreement with them on a 6-point Likert scale;
e.g., I know how to help my child do well in math; I don't know
how to help my child learn math (from 1 = Strongly Disagree to
6 = Strongly Agree). Some items were drafted at the same time as
the initial PBAF items and were included as a separate subscale during
the exploratory analyses (see Study 1). Minor wording changes were
made to the original items (e.g., in order to make them shorter or easier
to understand), and a few items were added and adapted (e.g., made
domain-specic instead of domain-general) from the Parent Perceptions of Parent Efcacy Scale (Hoover-Dempsey, Bassler, & Brissie,
1992). See supplementary materials for a list of all items. The scale
showed good internal consistency for math ( = .80) and reading
( = .86) in this sample. After reverse coding items that were phrased
in terms of low efcacy, responses were averaged to calculate participants' parental efcacy scores in each domain.
Parenting activity inventory
Parents indicated the frequency with which they engaged with their
child in 9 math-related (i.e., Using a calculator) and 13 reading-related
Table 3b
Correlations of all variablesStudy 2.
1. TOI
2. PBAF math
3. PBAF verbal
4. Mastery math
5. Mastery read
6. Perf math
7. Perf read
8. Efcacy math
9. Efcacy read
10. Activities math
11. Activities read
*p b .05; **p b .01. N = 86.
10
.53**
.53**
.51**
.41**
.09
.10
.46**
.45**
.17
.31**
.75**
.40**
.22*
.27*
.16
.52**
.52**
.22*
.35**
.42**
.36**
.21*
.13
.46**
.61**
.17
.21
.62**
.01
.09
.27*
.31**
.31**
.33**
.03
.13
.14
.25*
.18
.26*
.81**
.23*
.18
.07
.14
.26*
.22*
.02
.05
.65**
.32**
.40**
.18
.24*
.73**
Table 4b
Regression analyses predicting self-reported parenting behavior from Theories of Intelligence (TOI) scale and PBAF questionnaireStudy 2.
Model 1
PBAF
Model 2
TOI
Model 3
PBAF
TOI
Math mastery
Math
performance
Reading
mastery
R2
R2
R2
.20**
.19**
.45**
.08**
.42**
.06
Math
performance
Reading
mastery
R2
R2
R2
R2
.47**
.04**
.23**
.19**
.18**
.46**
.04
Math mastery
.22**
.06**
.19**
Reading
performance
.43**
.43**
.27**
.18**
.04**
.21**
85
.19**
.22**
.40**
.06
.48**
.03
Model 1
PBAF
Model 2
TOI
Model 3
PBAF
TOI
.16**
.07*
40**
.26**
.18
.41**
.21**
.31*
.07
.13
.01
.41**
.09
.02
.18**
.08*
R2
.36**
.27*
.51**
.14**
.01
.28**
Reading
performance
.10
.02
.20
.30*
.10
.04
(i.e., Telling stories) activities in the past month (math and reading
activities were presented together in a random order; see online supplementary materials for a full list of activities). Parents responded on
a 6-point Likert scale from Did not occur (coded as 1) to Daily
(coded as 6). Items were averaged to calculate participants' scores.
Math-related and literacy activities from this scale came from the
Frequency of Literacy and Numeracy Activities scale used by LeFevre,
Polyzoi, Skwarchuk, Fast, and Sowinski (2010), which included three literacy items and twelve math-related items; three math-related activities
from LeFevre et al. (2010) were not included because we were most interested in activities that mainly engaged children's numeracy skills and
eliminated items that did not (e.g., making/sorting collections). One of
the authors with expertise in literacy development created the additional
reading activities by examining each math-related activity and developing a corresponding reading activity (e.g., Memorizing math facts and
Memorizing letters/sounds or sight words), as well as adding some additional activities. The reading activities were designed to capture all
areas of literacy (i.e., vocabulary, phonemic awareness, writing) relevant
to children of preschool ages based on research on early language and literacy development. All activities (for both math and reading) were similar in terms of scope and function. We included activities that were both
directly related to numeracy and literacy (e.g., learning simple sums and
spelling words) and indirectly related to numeracy and literacy
(e.g., measuring ingredients and telling stories; see LeFevre et al., 2010).
The scale showed good internal consistency for math ( = .83) and
reading ( = .85) in this sample. 5
Results
Procedure
Participants lled out a series of questionnaires online. They rst
completed Dweck's (1999) Theories of Intelligence (TOI) scale and
then completed the Parental Beliefs about Ability Fixedness (PBAF)
scale and efcacy scale for domain 1 (i.e., math), the PBAF and efcacy
scale for domain 2 (i.e., verbal/reading), the competence questionnaire
in domain 1, the competence questionnaire in domain 2, the hypothetical scenario for domain 1, the hypothetical scenarios for domain 2, and
the parent activity inventory. The order of domain presentation was
counterbalanced across participants. With the exception of Dweck's
TOI Scale, the order of the items within each questionnaire was randomized. Parents were asked to report on demographic information at the
end of the study.
Participants were also asked to rate how important they perceived particular mathand reading-related activities to be, but analyses pertaining to this questionnaire are not
reported here.
Means and standard deviations of the PBAF are shown in Table 1. The
math and verbal scales of the PBAF were combined to create separate
scores for each domain ( = .87 for math; = .85 for verbal). There
was no missing data. Means for the PBAF subscales did not differ,
meaning that parents tended to believe that math and reading abilities
were equally xed, t(85) = .14, p = .89, d = .03. Subscale scores were
highly correlated (r = .75, p b .001).
6
We also conducted these analyses with parent sex, child sex, child age, parent education, and parent income entered as covariates into each model. The signicance of the TOI
and PBAF as predictors did not change, except for Model 3: the betas for both predictors
(TOI and PBAF) drop down to marginal signicance when the covariates were added.
86
7
We also conducted these analyses with parent sex, child sex, child age, parent education, and parent income entered as covariates into the rst step of each model. For Model
1, the PBAF-Math was no longer a signicant predictor of frequency of math activities
when the covariates were added (p = .26). Additionally, in Model 3, the TOI dropped
down to marginal signicance (p = .06) with the addition of the covariates.
Table 5
Regression analyses predicting frequency of engagement in math and reading activities
from Theories of Intelligence (TOI) scale and PBAF questionnaireStudy 2.
Model 1
PBAF
Model 2
TOI
Model 3
PBAF
TOI
Math activities
Reading activities
R2
R2
.05
.14**
.23*
.03
.20*
.20**
.17
.05
.31**
.20**
.19
.07
.05
.29*
and reading-related activities in the home. And, second, they show that
the relation between xedness beliefs and both parenting behavior and
parenting activities is, in some cases, mediated by their parental efcacy
(i.e., the belief that they are capable of helping their children to learn
and perform well in math and reading).
General discussion
The present studies are the rst to examine the association between
parents' naturally occurring (i.e., non-experimentally manipulated)
beliefs about the xedness of ability and their self-reported parenting
behavior. Results of both studies suggest that parents' xedness beliefs
were negatively associated with the likelihood of engaging in
autonomy-supportive and mastery-oriented parenting behaviors and
positively associated with the likelihood of engaging in controlling
and performance-oriented behaviors when their children struggle
with a math or reading task. Study 1 also validated a new instrument,
the Parental Beliefs about Ability Fixedness (PBAF) scale, which measures parents' child-specic beliefs about the xedness of math and
verbal ability. The math and verbal factors of the scale were found to
be distinct yet highly correlated.
One explanation for our ndings is that parents who believe that
their children's abilities are relatively xed (perhaps at a low level)
also believe that their children are unlikely to benet from masteryoriented behavior and thus resort to performance-oriented and controlling behavior in order to ensure that their children do not perform poorly. The same parents may also feel that engaging in math- and readingrelated activities with their children at the home is unlikely to improve
their children's math and verbal abilities. Conversely, parents who
believe that their children's abilities are relatively malleable and can develop with effort may think that the best way to help their children
achieve their goals is to allow them to learn from their own mistakes.
Thus, they are likely to prefer to engage in mastery-oriented and
autonomy-supportive behaviors. They may also believe that engaging
their children in math- and reading-related activities at home is a
good way to improve their abilities over time.
This explanation is consistent with the results of Moorman and
Pomerantz (2010), which showed that parents induced to hold an
entity (xed) mindset about a task displayed more controlling and
performance-oriented behaviors when helping their children than parents induced to hold an incremental (growth) mindset. However, this
study manipulated parents' beliefs about the intellectual abilities
assessed by a particular task as opposed to measuring their naturally
occurring beliefs about the xedness of intelligence (generally) and of
their children's math and verbal abilities (specically). In Study 1,
our newly constructed measure of child- and domain-specic xedness
beliefs (the Parental Beliefs about Ability Fixedness scale, or
PBAF) emerged as a stronger predictor of parents' mastery- and
performance-oriented parenting behavior in both the math and reading
domains than Dweck's (1999) general measure of xedness beliefs. Furthermore, in Study 2, the PBAF signicantly predicted parenting behavior in three out of four combinations of behavior type and domain,
whereas the general measure predicted behavior in only two. That is,
parents' general xedness beliefs strongly predicted their masteryoriented behavior in both the math and reading domains (in fact,
more strongly the PBAF), but did not signicantly predict their
performance-oriented behavior in the math domain (unlike the PBAF).
Together, the results from Studies 1 and 2 suggest that, in certain contexts, child- and domain-specic xedness beliefs are more strongly
predictive of parenting behavior than general xedness beliefs; and, in
other contexts, may predict a broader range of behavior.
An important question is why our child- and domain-specic measure of xedness beliefs appears to be a better predictor of parenting behavior in some cases than a more general measure of xedness beliefs.
Our results suggest that the predictive power of our measure is due
more to the fact that it is child-specic rather than domain-specic.
87
88
in the mean levels of parents' self-reported master- and performanceoriented behavior. Parents thought they were much more likely to
engage in mastery-oriented behaviors compared to performanceoriented behaviors (which tend to have negative connotations).
Perhaps the disparity between mastery- and performance-oriented parenting behaviors would have been smaller if parents' behaviors had
been discreetly observed in a home context. Beyond social desirability
concerns, it may have also been challenging for participants to imagine
themselves within a hypothetical situation that involved interacting
with a preschool aged child, especially for the parents in Study 1,
many of whose children were well beyond preschool age. However,
we controlled for child age in all of our focal analyses, and still found a
consistent pattern of results. We also found that entering child age as
a moderator did not change the general pattern of results that we reported (see Footnote 4). Another reason that relying solely on parents'
self-reports can be problematic is that it can inate relations among
measures (e.g., DeYoung, 2006). In order to address this concern, future
studies should use multi-informant methods, such as child-report of
parents' behaviors in addition to parent-report. Researchers could also
observe parents' behaviors in the home or the laboratory in order to better capture the extent to which they use mastery- or performanceoriented strategies.
Demographically, our sample consisted of mostly mothers, although
Study 1 was much more gender balanced than Study 2. It is therefore
important to keep in mind when interpreting the results that these patterns may look different if our sample had consisted of mostly fathers.
Additionally, parents were not asked about their family composition
(i.e., whether they live in a one- or two-parent household), which
could certainly inuence their levels of autonomy supportive versus
controlling behavior. Future research could examine how these
demographic characteristics inuence the association between parents'
xedness beliefs and their behaviors.
A nal limitation is that measures of parents' beliefs and behaviors
were administered during a single testing session. Thus, it is possible
that parenting behavior actually predicts xedness beliefs and not the
other way around. However, previous research by Moorman and
Pomerantz (2010), which temporarily manipulated xedness beliefs
showed that xedness beliefs do, in some cases, lead to changes in parenting behavior. Future research can examine the causal inuence of
parents' xedness beliefs on their parenting behavior using longitudinal
designs.
Conclusion
Children often experience challenge, difculty, and even failure
when engaging in difcult academic tasks. How parents respond to
their children's struggles can potentially impact children's motivation
and success in school. When parents become frustrated and controlling,
children may learn to give up on challenging tasks. In contrast, when
parents allow children to make their own decisions and mistakes, children may learn to persist when they are confronted with challenges.
The current studies demonstrate how parents' beliefs might help to account for these differences in their behavior. Specically, parents' beliefs
about the xedness of their children's math and verbal abilities appear to
be important predictors of how parents will behave when their children
are struggling with an academic task. The current studies introduce a
new instrument, the Parental Beliefs about Ability Fixedness (PBAF)
scale, for measuring these xedness beliefs. Ultimately, the more that
we know about what drives parents' behaviors, the better prepared
we can be to educate parents about what types of beliefs and behaviors
will enhance their children's motivation and learning.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at http://dx.
doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2015.08.002.
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