UC Berkeley

Dweck (1986) hypothesized that some students believe intelligence is a stable quantity that cannot be altered (i.e., fixed) whereas other students view intelligence as a flexible trait that can be changed with effort (i.e., malleable). Presumably, students with a malleable belief about, or a malleable conception of, intellectual ability will be more efficacious in their academic performance compared to those with a fixed conception. Little research exists on the relationships between conceptions of ability and self-efficacy. Using a sample of 151 predominately Asian and Filipino American middle school students from an urban area, I examined the relationships among domain-specific conceptions of ability and domain-specific self-efficacy in the areas of intellectual, creative, and sport abilities. Participants were recruited from a school in the San Francisco Bay Area of the United States. Results indicated that conceptions of intellectual ability did not predict a meaningful proportion of the variance in academic self-efficacy and conceptions of creative ability did not predict a meaningful proportion of the variance in creative self-efficacy. Conceptions of sport ability accounted for a meaningful proportion of the variance in sport self-efficacy. There were no associations between conceptions of intellectual ability and self-reported grades. Implications of the findings within the field, limitations of the current study, and future directions of research are discussed.