What Dweck's theory claims

1. Dweck argues that what you believe about the nature of ability quietly steers how you behave the moment work gets hard.
2. She described two beliefs, which she called a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.

The two mindsets

1. With a fixed mindset you treat ability as a set trait you were handed, so a poor result feels like a verdict on how clever you are.
2. That pushes you away from hard tasks, because failing one would seem to prove you lack the talent you were relying on.
3. With a growth mindset you treat ability as something that grows through effort and better strategies, so a poor result is just information about what to change.
4. That pulls you towards challenge, because a hard task is exactly where your ability can stretch.

Ability and effort

1. In a fixed mindset, ability decides the outcome and effort is what you fall back on when ability runs out, so needing to try hard is itself a sign of weakness.
2. In a growth mindset, effort is what builds ability in the first place, so working hard is simply what able people do.
3. That reversal explains the behaviour: if effort exposes you, you protect yourself by not trying, and if effort builds you, trying is the obvious move.
4. It also traps you, because a fixed mindset lowers effort, lower effort produces worse results, and those results look like proof that the belief was right all along.

Strengths and weaknesses of the theory

1. A strength is that it explains something ability alone cannot, namely why two equally able people respond to the same failure in opposite ways.
2. A further strength is that it is useful and testable, because mindset can be taught and the effect of teaching it can then be measured.
3. A weakness is that real people are mixed rather than one type, since you can hold a growth mindset in art and a fixed one in maths, which makes labelling a whole person unreliable.
4. Mindset is also measured mostly by asking people about their own beliefs, and self-report is subjective, so answers can drift towards what sounds like the right attitude.

Turning this into marks

1. Scenario questions hand you a pupil's reaction to failure, so quote what they said or did and name the mindset it reveals, because the scenario link carries its own mark.
2. If the question mentions ability or effort, make the relationship between them explicit, since that is exactly what is being tested and the part most answers skip.
3. The mark most often lost is the judgement, so after giving a strength and a weakness say which side you find more convincing and why.