Psychological measuresBrief psychol

Psychological measures
Brief psychological measures were administered at the
start of Session 1 and at the end of Session 2. First, to
confirm that the growth-mind-set intervention changed
students’ beliefs about the malleability of intelligence, we
assessed this belief using two items: “You can learn new
things, but you can’t really change your basic intelligence”
and “You have a certain amount of intelligence
and you really can’t do much to change it” (α = .84; see
Blackwell et al., 2007). Second, we examined students’
construal of mundane academic tasks using a meaningfulness-of-schoolwork
task (Yeager, Henderson, D’Mello,
et al., 2014; see also Steger, Bundick, & Yeager, 2012),
which assesses whether students view schoolwork (e.g.,
“Doing your math homework”) at a low, mechanical level
(e.g., “Typing numbers into a calculator and writing formulas”)
or at a high level relevant to learning and growth
(“Building your problem-solving skills”; see Michaels,
Parkin, & Vallacher, 2013). Eight items formed a reliable
composite, α = .72. Although this measure is more closely