Diana Senechal teaches philosophy at Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science, and Engineering in New York City; in addition, she serves on the faculty of the Sue Rose Summer Institute for Teachers at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. In this article she states that if someone had told her five years ago that she would be a high…

Students' beliefs that success in science depends on exceptional talent negatively impact their motivation to learn. For example, such beliefs have been shown to be a major factor steering students away from taking science and math courses in high school and college. In the present study, we tested a novel story-based instruction that models how…