Change in Implicit Theories of Ability in Sports Over Time

Background/Purpose:

Students’ ability conceptions strongly predict their engagement in PE. According to theory (Dweck, 2002), there exist two dimensions: Entity/fixed and malleable through hard work. Individuals’ implicit theories of ability are socially and individually constructed. At about 7-8 years old, children are beginning to understand ability as a potentially stable personal trait. When reaching 10-12 years old, more students begin to endorse entity-like theories of ability. A study in England by Warburton and Spray (2008) showed a linear decline in students’ endorsement of incremental and entity beliefs in sports in transition from Year 6 to Year 7. However, there is a lack of thorough understandings of the developmental change of implicit theories of ability in sports. Our purpose was to address this gap by examining change in implicit theories of ability in sports through a cross-sectional study.

Method: Participants were 264 2^nd, 272 3^rd, 272 5^th, 190 8^th, 146 10^th, 80 11^th, and 251 12^th graders and 34 freshmen, 264 sophomore, 105 Junior, and 49 senior college students in China. They completed a demographic survey, a questionnaire “implicit theories of ability in sports”, and other questionnaires for research purposes in their classroom. All the surveys were translated into Chinese and back-translated into English by the second author who are bilingual and affluent in Chinese and English. Three experts in achievement motivation were invited to check the accuracy of the translations. These experts are bilingual and affluent in Chinese and English.

Analysis/Results: One-Way ANOVAs were conducted to examine how students’ implicit theories of ability in sports would differ as a function of grade levels. Due to low Cronbach’s alpha of .56, the entity subscale was dropped from analysis. The Cronbach’s alpha for incremental subscale was .77. The results showed that there were significant grade differences in incremental views of ability in sports, F(10, 1916)=17.84, p<.0001.

Conclusions: The 2^nd, 3^rd and 5^th graders held the same levels of incremental views. They displayed higher levels of incremental views than those in 8^th, 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th graders, and college students except that there was no difference between 3^rd graders and college freshmen. There was a linear decrease from 5^th to 8^th graders and from 8^th to 10^th graders, and then participants’ incremental views remained constant between 3.36 and 3.57. This study can have a great contribution to the conceptions of developmental change of ability beliefs and provides age-related information for interventions.