Mindset and music: Developing the ‘Musical Self-Theories and Goals’ questionnaire

This article is based on an original research article published in Frontiers in Education (Müllensiefen et al., 2015). Theories of intelligence and academic performance  Despite theories of intelligence being uncorrelated with general cognitive ability (Dweck et al., 1995), (Robins and Pals, 2002), theories of intelligence do appear to reliably predict academic performance in students, especially when the learning environment is a challenging one (Henderson and Dweck, 1990), (Dweck and Sorich, 1999), (Robins and Pals, 2002). One important contributing factor to this is how children respond to failure. Some adolescents attribute their failures to a lack of ability, and therefore view the difficulty as insurmountable. In order to avoid further failure, they stop investing effort in the task. Diener and Dweck (Diener and Dweck, 1980) termed this reaction the helpless response pattern. In contrast, some adolescents exhibit a mastery-oriented pattern (Diener and Dweck, 1980), w