Students’ Thinking About Effort and Ability: The Role of Developmental, Contextual, and Individual Difference Factors

Students’ thinking about the relation between effort and ability can influence their motivation, affect, and academic achievement. Students sometimes think of effort as inversely related to ability (such that people with low ability must work harder than people with high ability) and other times think of effort as positively related to ability (such that hard work can lead people to develop high levels of ability). The purposes of the present review are (a) to review literature on developmental, contextual, and individual difference factors that influence students’ thinking about the relation between effort and ability in school and (b) to identify unresolved questions in this literature and present an extended theoretical framework that can help answer these questions. By providing researchers with a better understanding of how students think about effort and ability, we hope that this review will inspire new research in this area.