Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 41 (2015) 7889

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology

Parental beliefs about the xedness of ability

Katherine Muenks a,, David B. Miele b, Geetha B. Ramani a, Laura M. Stapleton a, Meredith L. Rowe a
a
b

Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, 3304 Benjamin Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20782, USA
Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology Department, 239E Campion Hall, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 5 June 2014
Received in revised form 6 May 2015
Accepted 30 August 2015
Available online 28 October 2015
Editor: Kimberly Anne Schonert-Reichl
Keywords:
Parents
Beliefs
Ability
Questionnaire
Motivation

a b s t r a c t
The present studies examined whether parents' beliefs about the xedness of ability predict their self-reported
interactions with their children. Parents' xedness beliefs were measured at two levels of specicity: their general beliefs about intelligence and their beliefs about their children's math and verbal abilities. Study 1, conducted
with an online sample of 300 parents, showed that the more parents believed that abilities were xed, the more
likely they were to endorse controlling and performance-oriented behaviors and the less likely they were to endorse autonomy-supportive and mastery-oriented behaviors. Study 2, conducted with 86 parents from a university database, partially replicated the results of Study 1 and also showed that parents' beliefs predicted the selfreported frequency with which they engaged in math- and reading-related activities with their children at home.
Specically, the more parents believed that abilities were xed, the less frequently they reported engaging in
math- and reading-related activities.
2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Prior to formal schooling, parents play a critical role in the development of their children's foundational math and literacy skills by providing them with opportunities to learn in their early home environment.
However, parents vary widely in the amount and type of math- and
reading-related activities they engage in with their children at home
(Baker & Scher, 2002; LeFevre et al., 2009). They also vary in the quality
of their interactions during these activities. At times parents may emphasize learning and mastery of skills, while other times they may
focus on improving their children's performance. In addition, sometimes parents act in ways that promote their children's autonomy,
while other times they attempt to control their children's behavior
(Pomerantz, Moorman, & Litwack, 2007). Both the quantity and quality
of parentchild interactions have important implications for children's
motivation and achievement in school (Pomerantz et al., 2007).
Given that the quality of parents' interactions inuences the development of children's skills and motivation, it is important to examine
factors that may underlie differences in parents' behavior. One potential
factor is parents' beliefs about the xedness or malleability of their
children's abilities (i.e., whether they believe that their children's
abilities are innate and stable over time, or can be improved through
effort and practice). Although these beliefs have been successfully

Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 301 405 2825; fax: +1 301 405 2891.
E-mail addresses: kmuenks@umd.edu (K. Muenks), d.miele@bc.edu (D.B. Miele),
gramani@umd.edu (G.B. Ramani), lstaplet@umd.edu (L.M. Stapleton), mrowe@umd.edu
(M.L. Rowe).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2015.08.002
0193-3973/ 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

manipulated in a laboratory context and shown to be causally related

to parents' behavior toward their children (Moorman & Pomerantz,
2010), no studies have examined whether parents' naturally occurring
(i.e., non-manipulated) beliefs about the xedness of intelligence or
ability predict the type of behavior they report engaging in outside of
the lab. Furthermore, some studies that have measured parents' xedness beliefs (but looked at different outcomes; e.g., Jose & Bellamy,
2012; Pomerantz & Dong, 2006; cf. Karkkainen, Raty, & Kasanen,
2011; Wentzel, 1998) have focused on what parents believe about intelligence in general. However, considering that people vary in terms of
their lay beliefs about critical periods in development (e.g., whether
ability is malleable at some ages but not others; Worden, Hinton, &
Fischer, 2011), it seems likely that what parents believe about their
own children's abilities in particular domains differs from what they believe about intelligence more generally. Therefore, in the present studies, we measured parents' beliefs about ability at two levels of
specicity: 1) their general beliefs about the xedness of intelligence;
and 2) their specic beliefs about the xedness of their child's math
and verbal abilities. We then examined whether these beliefs predict
(a) the quality of the behaviors (mastery- vs. performance-oriented)
they use to help their young children complete challenging academic
tasks, and (b) the frequency with which they engage in math- and
reading-related home activities that are thought to improve children's
abilities in these domains. Finally, we measured parental efcacy
(i.e., the extent to which parents' believe they are capable of improving
their children's abilities) and examined whether it mediated the effect
of parents' xedness beliefs on their parenting behavior.

K. Muenks et al. / Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 41 (2015) 7889

The quality of parents' interactions

One of the central aims of the current studies was to examine
whether parents' beliefs about the xedness of their children's math
and verbal abilities predict the quality of self-reported parentchild
interactions. In dening quality of interactions, we draw from both
self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) and achievement goal
theory (Maehr & Zusho, 2009).
Self-determination theory: Autonomy-supportive versus controlling parenting
One dimension of parenting style that can impact children's development is the extent to which parents interact with their children in
an autonomy-supportive versus a controlling manner. Autonomy support involves encouraging children to explore their environment,
solve problems independently, and make their own decisions. In contrast, controlling behavior involves tightly regulating children's actions
by issuing commands, providing external incentives, and modulating
affection (Pomerantz et al., 2007). It is important to note that controlling
behavior is more likely to emerge when there is a threat in the environment, such as when parents feel there is a possibility that their children
may not do well on a task (Gurland & Grolnick, 2005), and is associated
with expressions of negative affect, such as frustration (Moorman &
Pomerantz, 2010).
Research has shown that autonomy support has a positive long-term
inuence on children's academic performance, whereas controlling behavior has a negative inuence (see Pomerantz et al., 2007, for a review). Hess and McDevitt (1984) showed that the self-reported
tendency of certain mothers to control the behavior of their 4-yearold children was associated with these children exhibiting lower levels
of verbal ability at age 4 and lower verbal and math achievement at age
12. Grolnick, Gurland, DeCourcey, and Jacob (2002) found that the more
autonomy-supportive and less controlling mothers were when helping
their third-grade children complete two homework-like tasks in the lab,
the better the children performed on these tasks.
Achievement goal theory: Mastery- versus performance-oriented parenting
behavior
Another important dimension of parenting style is the extent to
which parents exhibit mastery- versus performance-oriented behavior
when interacting with their children. Mastery-oriented parenting
involves teaching children to value the process of learning and to appreciate the importance of effort. In contrast, performance-oriented parenting involves encouraging or helping children demonstrate high levels of
performance with little effort, even if this comes at the expense of actual
learning (Gottfried, Fleming, & Gottfried, 1994). Research suggests that
mastery-oriented parenting leads to positive academic outcomes. In one
study, the self-reported frequency with which mothers engaged in
mastery-oriented practices with their 9-year-old children, such as encouragement of curiosity, positively predicted these children's concurrent intrinsic motivation, which in turn predicted their math and
reading performance on a standardized test at age 10 (Gottfried et al.,
1994). In another set of studies by Mueller and Dweck (1998), fthgrade children who initially received positive feedback from an experimenter about their effort (a typical mastery-oriented parenting
behavior) exhibited greater task persistence, enjoyment, and performance in response to a later failure compared to children who received
positive feedback about their ability (see also Gunderson et al., 2013;
Pomerantz & Kempner, 2013).
Although a distinction can be made between the autonomy-supportive
versus controlling and mastery-oriented versus performance-oriented
dimensions of parenting, these constructs may actually be interconnected
in some contexts. For example, when parents act in autonomysupportive ways, they foster mastery-oriented behavior in their children
by encouraging independent attempts to master skills that promote a

79

sense of competence (e.g., Frodi, Bridges, & Grolnick, 1985). On the

other hand, when parents are primarily concerned with ensuring that
their children perform well on a task (i.e., performance-oriented), they
may be particularly likely to engage in controlling behaviors
(e.g., Grolnick et al., 2002). Thus, in keeping with previous research
(e.g., Moorman & Pomerantz, 2010), we examine the two parenting dimensions as a single construct and contrast autonomy-supportive and
mastery-oriented parenting behavior (mastery-oriented behavior for
short) with controlling and performance-oriented parenting behavior
(performance-oriented behavior for short).
Parents' beliefs about the xedness of their children's abilities
One factor that likely inuences parents' mastery- versus
performance-oriented behavior is their beliefs about the xedness of
their children's abilities. According to Dweck's (1999) research on beliefs about intelligence, some individuals view intelligence as a xed
and stable trait, and do not believe that intelligence can be changed
(i.e., entity theorists), whereas others view intelligence as malleable
and able to improve with effort (i.e., incremental theorists). Consistent
with Dweck's (1999) distinction between xed and growth mindsets,
we used the term xedness to describe the continuum of beliefs
ranging from entity to incremental.
Although much research has examined how children's beliefs about
the xedness of intelligence affect the way they pursue their own goals
(see Dweck, 1999), less is known about how parents' beliefs about the
xedness of intelligence might affect the way they pursue the goals
they have for their children. Parents' beliefs about the nature of intelligence may provide them with a framework for how and how often
they engage their children in school-related activities. For example, parents who believe that their children's math or verbal abilities are relatively xed may not think that it is particularly useful to frequently
engage them in math- or reading-related activities. In addition, when
their children struggle with a math or reading task, they may infer
that their children have reached the limits of their math or verbal ability.
This inference, combined with the assumption that there is not much
they can do to improve their children's ability (i.e., low parental efcacy),
may lead them to assert control over their children's behavior in
order to ensure that they do not do poorly on the task. In contrast,
incremental-minded parents may believe that it is useful to frequently
engage in math- and reading-related activities with their children because working hard in these domains can substantially improve their
children's abilities. They may also be more likely than entity-minded
parents to focus on their children's learning rather than performance.
For example, they may allow their children to struggle with a problem
because they think that this affords them an opportunity to improve
their ability. Thus, parents' xedness beliefs will likely predict both the
frequency with which they engage in math- and reading-related activities within the home as well as the quality of their interactions during
those activities.
Preliminary evidence for these hypotheses comes from a recent
study (Moorman & Pomerantz, 2010) that examined the effects of
mothers' theories of intelligence on the quality of their interactions
with their 69-year-old children during a puzzle task. Researchers induced an entity or incremental mindset in mothers by telling them
that the task tapped either innate ability or intellectual potential, respectively. Mothers induced to hold an entity (xed) mindset displayed
more unconstructive involvement, such as performance-oriented
teaching, control, and negative affect during the task than did mothers
induced to hold an incremental (growth) mindset. However, because
parents' beliefs were induced and their behavior was observed in the
lab, it is unclear whether parents' naturally occurring beliefs about the
xedness of ability also predict their behaviors.
The current studies seek to extend the previous literature by measuring both parents' general beliefs about intelligence as well as their
more specic beliefs about their children's math and verbal abilities.

80

K. Muenks et al. / Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 41 (2015) 7889

These more specic beliefs may capture important variance associated

with parents' beliefs about their children's abilities and thus better predict parents' behaviors. Parents' specic beliefs about the xedness of
their children's abilities may be unique for several reasons. First, parents
may think differently about their own children than other individuals;
for example, research has found that parents tend to overestimate
their own children's academic performance (Miller, 1988), which suggests that they may think about their own children differently than children in general. Second, to the extent that parents know about critical or
sensitive periods in development (Worden et al., 2011), it is possible
that they think about the xedness of children's intellectual abilities
differently than adults' abilities (Miller, 1988; Murphey, 1992).
The present studies also examine whether parents' beliefs are specific to academic domains. For example, some parents may simultaneously
hold entity beliefs about their children's math ability and incremental
beliefs about their children's verbal ability. Thus, it may be necessary
to measure ability beliefs that match the task domain (e.g., Chen,
2012; Chen, Metcalf, & Tutwiler, 2014) in order to best predict the
kinds of behaviors parents will engage in when helping their children.
Frequency of math- and reading-related activities in the home
Prior research showing that parents' beliefs about child development relate to both the quantity and quality of their child-directed
speech (Rowe, 2008) suggest that parents' xedness beliefs may predict
the frequency with which they engage in math- and reading-related
activities at home, in addition to the quality of their parentchild interactions. Previous research suggests that parents who frequently engage
in activities that support early numerical development (Huntsinger,
Jose, Larson, Balsink Krieg, & Shaligram, 2000; LeFevre et al., 2009)
and early language development (Ezell & Justice, 2000; Whitehurst &
Lonigan, 1998) have children with greater math knowledge and uency, and greater emergent literacy skills (respectively). These early
math and literacy skills are important precursors to children's learning
and achievement in elementary school and beyond (Duncan et al.,
2007; Stevenson & Newman, 1986). We hypothesize that the less parents believe that their children's abilities in a particular domain are
xed, the more they believe that they are capable of improving their
children's abilities (i.e., the higher their parental efcacy) and, thus,
the more likely they are to engage their children in domain-related
activities at home.
The present studies
The present studies have several aims. The primary aim is to examine whether two measures of parental beliefs (i.e., parents' general
beliefs about the xedness of intelligence and their child-specic beliefs
about the xedness of math and verbal ability) differentially predict the
types of parenting behavior (mastery versus performance) that parents
report engaging in when helping their children with difcult math and
reading tasks (Studies 1 and 2). As part of this aim, we also set the goal
of validating a new questionnaire that measures parents' domain- and
child-specic beliefs about the xedness of ability (Study 1).
The second aim is to examine whether parents' general and specic
xedness beliefs predict the frequency with which they engage in mathand reading-related activities with their children at home (Study 2).
And, the third and nal aim is to examine parental efcacy as a mediator
of the relation between parents' xedness beliefs and parenting
behavior (Study 2).
In addition to these three aims, we also examined whether parents'
beliefs and behaviors were related to demographic variables such as sex
(of both parent and child), parent education, and parent income. Previous research suggests that these variables may predict parents' beliefs
and behaviors as well as children's achievement (e.g., Davis-Kean,
2005; Hugh & Romney, 1991).

Study 1
Study 1 addressed our rst aim. Parents were recruited online and
asked to complete a series of questionnaires measuring their specic beliefs about the xedness of their children's math and verbal abilities and
their general beliefs about the xedness of intelligence. After they completed these questionnaires, the parents read two scenarios in which
they were asked to imagine their child (as a preschooler) struggling to
complete a difcult math or reading task. They were then presented
with a list of mastery- and performance-oriented behaviors and asked
to say how likely they would be to engage in each of them.
We predicted that parents hold domain-specic beliefs about the
xedness of their children's abilities and that these beliefs would better
predict the types of behaviors they engage in when helping their children during difcult academic tasks than their general xedness beliefs.
More specically, we expected that the more parents believed their
children's math and verbal abilities are xed, the more likely they
would be to report engaging in performance-oriented behaviors and
the less likely they would report engaging in mastery-oriented behaviors during challenging tasks in those domains.
Method
Participants
Three hundred and eleven parents participated in the study through
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a website that is accessed and used
by a large, diverse population of adults from around the world. Individuals who are interested in joining MTurk can register as workers who
receive small payments for their participation in various surveys, experiments, or other tasks (see Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011). Recent
research suggests that the internal consistency of self-reported demographics on MTurk is high, evidenced by the fact that the same workers
gave the same demographic information across multiple studies
(Mason & Suri, 2012). Additionally, replication studies indicate that
MTurk participants display a similar level of consistency across selfreport surveys as is typically seen in non-Internet studies (Buhrmester
et al., 2011; Rand, 2012). For this study, we recruited workers from
the United States and paid them $0.75 to participate. We advertised
our online questionnaire with a short paragraph on the MTurk website.
Eleven parents were excluded from the analysis because they failed to
complete the rst questionnaire, gave nonsense responses to openended reliability check items, or reported that they had participated in
a previous version of the study. The nal sample consisted of 300 parents (65% female) who ranged in age from 19 to 75 years (M = 36.18,
SD = 10.95), and were primarily European American (78.5%; 7.8%
African American; 5.1% Asian American; 4.1% Hispanic; 4.5% other ethnicities). Forty-ve percent of parents had at least a four-year bachelor's
degree, and 41% of parents had a current household income above
$50,000 per year. Most parents (79%) had only one or two children.
Parents were asked to think about only one of their children when completing the survey; 60% of parents thought about a male child and 40%
thought about a female child. The age of the child that parents thought
about ranged from 1 to 47 years at the time of the survey, with a mean
age of 10.13 years (SD = 8.33) and a median age of 8 years. 28.5% of parents thought about a child who was preschool aged, 39.4% thought about
a child who was elementary school aged, 8.8% thought about a child who
was middle school aged, 9.6% thought about a child who was high school
aged, 10% thought about a child who was between 18 and 30 years of
age, and 3.1% thought about a child who was over 30 years of age.
Measures
Specic ability xedness beliefs
Because no existing instruments measured parents' specic beliefs
about the xedness of their children's math and verbal abilities, we

K. Muenks et al. / Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 41 (2015) 7889

81

Table 1
Means and standard deviations of PBAF items.
Study 1

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

My child's math [verbal] ability is innate and will never change.

My child's math [verbal] ability can change signicantly from birth. (RC)
After a certain point in childhood, my child' math [verbal] ability cannot improve.
My child can always improve his/her math [verbal] ability, no matter how old he/she is. (RC)
My child's math [verbal] ability can only be substantially improved during a specic period of time in his/her development.
My child is past the age at which he/she can substantially improve his/her math [verbal] ability.

Study 2

Math

Verbal

Math

Verbal

2.27 (1.16)
2.01 (1.07)
2.25 (1.16)
2.14 (1.09)
2.98 (1.50)
2.19 (1.29)

2.09 (1.07)
1.84 (.97)
2.32 (1.25)
2.17 (1.08)
2.90 (1.51)
2.28 (1.38)

2.12 (1.05)
1.92 (1.02)
1.86 (.86)
2.06 (1.02)
2.42 (1.01)
1.72 (.88)

1.95 (.96)
1.77 (.94)
1.97 (.79)
1.98 (.91)
2.48 (1.18)
1.91 (.94)

Note. RC = reverse coded. Standard deviations are in parentheses.

developed and validated a questionnaire that measures these beliefs.

The rst and second authors drafted approximately 80 closed-ended
items that were originally intended to measure not only ability xedness, but also seven other related constructs including effort beliefs
and parents' efcacy to improve their children's abilities. Although the
items were designed to assess beliefs that apply to a specic academic
or intellectual domain, they were phrased in a general manner so that
this domain could be changed without substantial rewording. Designing
a single set of items that could be used with multiple domains allowed
us to directly compare parents' beliefs across these domains (e.g., do
parents tend to believe that their child's math ability is more xed
than his or her verbal ability)?
Feedback regarding the initial set of items was gathered from
approximately four professors in the eld of human development
(who are all parents), two advanced graduate students, and at least
two parents who are not professors. The professors and graduate students were asked to evaluate the items based on how well they assessed
the constructs they were intended to measure, how clear or understandable they were, and (for the professors who were also parents)
how relevant they were to real parents. The non-professor parents
were asked to read and respond to each item and to provide their
thoughts or feedback about the item's clarity (e.g., if the item was confusing or they did not know how to answer it). All feedback from professors, graduate students, and parents was provided individually to the
rst author, either by email or in person. Based on this feedback,
20 items were removed, and other items were modied. Once the questionnaire was narrowed down to 60 items per domain, we conducted
three iterations of exploratory analyses (both exploratory and conrmatory factor analyses were used for exploratory purposes) with
three samples of parents (total N = 812, after exclusions) on Amazon's
Mechanical Turk. These samples were independent from each other as
well as from the sample for Study 1. The rst iteration included 294 parents (64.3% female, 78.4% European American, Mage = 36.62 years) and
resulted in the elimination of 40 items per domain based on exploratory
factor analysis (EFA). The second iteration included 200 parents (61.5%
female, 71% European American, Mage = 36.24 years) and resulted in
the modication or removal of several items based on results from conrmatory factor analyses (CFAs). The third iteration included 318 parents (67% female, 74.5% European American, Mage = 35.68 years) and
resulted in the removal or modication of additional items based on
CFAs (see supplemental materials for full description of scale construction procedures). The authors also decided at this point to focus exclusively on the ability xedness construct, rather than the other seven
constructs the original scale was intended to measure. After all three iterations, a nal set of six items (per domain) was used for the Parental
Beliefs about Ability Fixedness (PBAF) scale (see Table 1 for all items).
The nal six items of the Parental Beliefs about Ability Fixedness
(PBAF) scale can be phrased in terms of math or verbal ability. Some
of these items assess beliefs about xedness across the lifespan
(e.g., My child's math (verbal) ability will never change), while
other items assess xedness in terms of a critical period in development
(e.g., My child's math [verbal] ability can only be substantially improved during a specic period of time in his/her development; My
child is past the age at which he/she can substantially improve his/her

math [verbal] ability). Parents were asked to indicate the extent to

which they agreed or disagreed with each item on a 6-point Likert
scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 6 = Strongly Agree). Before completing the items in a particular domain, parents were informed that,
By math (verbal) ability, we mean your child's ability to learn mathrelated (language-related) knowledge and skills, not his or her current
math (language) skills. We used the term verbal ability rather than
reading ability to further reduce the possibility that parents would confuse verbal ability with reading skills. The scale showed good internal
consistency for both the math ( = .85) and verbal ( = .85) subscales in the current sample. After reverse coding the incremental
items, responses were averaged to calculate participants' nal PBAF
math and verbal scores.
General xedness beliefs
We used Dweck's (1999) Theories of Intelligence (TOI) scale to measure parents' general beliefs about the xedness of intelligence. The version we used consists of eight items; e.g., You have a certain amount of
intelligence and you can't really do much to change it and You can
learn new things, but you can't really change your basic intelligence.
Parents were asked to indicate the extent to which they agreed or
disagreed with each item on a 6-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 6 = Strongly Agree). The scale showed excellent internal
consistency in this sample ( = .96). After reverse coding the incremental items, responses were averaged to calculate participants' nal
TOI scores.
Competence beliefs
We measured parents' beliefs about their children's current competence (i.e., how good they are) in math and reading and then used
this to establish the discriminant validity of the PBAF. Parents rated
their children's competence in math and reading using items adapted
from the University of Michigan's Childhood and Beyond (CAB) study
(Fredericks & Eccles, 2002). Four questions were asked per domain
with responses on a 7-point rating scale; e.g., How good is your child
in math? (1 = Not good at all to 7 = Very good). The scale
showed excellent internal consistency for both math ( = .91) and
reading ( = .91).1 After reverse coding some items, responses were
averaged to calculate participants' scores.
Self-reported behavior
Two hypothetical scenarios were presented in which parents were
asked to imagine their child as a preschooler struggling to complete a
challenging math or reading task (for all other parts of the survey, parents were not explicitly asked to imagine their child at a particular age,
and therefore presumably thought about their child at his or her current
age; thus, child age was controlled for in the focal analyses, as discussed
in more detail below). For each scenario, parents were given a list of six
mastery-oriented and autonomy-supportive behaviors (e.g., Explain or
1
In Studies 1 and 2, parents were also asked to respond to items about how much their
child valued math and reading, but analyses pertaining to those items are not reported
here. In addition, moderator analyses were conducted with the child competence scale
for both studies (in keeping with Pomerantz & Dong, 2006), but are also not reported here.

82

K. Muenks et al. / Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 41 (2015) 7889

give hints about the problem without actually solving the problem;
= .76 math, = .72 reading) and eight performance-oriented
and controlling behaviors (e.g., Tell your child the correct answer;
= .82 math, = .77 reading); mastery- and performance-oriented
behaviors were presented together in a random order (see online supplementary materials for the full list of behaviors). Parents then indicated how likely they would be to engage in each behavior on a 6-point
Likert-type scale (1 = Very Unlikely to 6 = Very Likely). The
rst and second author created the hypothetical scenarios and list
of behaviors based on previous literature (e.g., Reeve & Jang, 2006)
and expert opinion.2 Items were averaged to calculate participants'
scores.
Demographics
Parents reported on a number of demographic variables, including
their gender (heretofore referred to as sex), ethnicity, age, education,
income, and number of children. Education was measured as the
highest level of education completed, from 1 = Grammar school to
7 = Professional degree (PhD, MD, JD, etc.). Income was measured
as the current household income in U.S. dollars, from 1 = Under
$10,000 to 9 = Over $150,000.
Procedure
Prospective participants were rst asked whether or not they were a
parent, and were only allowed to proceed to the main survey once they
conrmed that they were. Parents then lled out a series of online questionnaires that were administered using Qualtrics Research Suite. For
the questionnaires that were child-specic, parents with multiple
children were asked to think about one particular child. They rst
completed Dweck's domain-general TOI Scale and then completed the
domain-specic PBAF in domain 1 (e.g., math), the PBAF in domain 2
(e.g., verbal), the competence questionnaire in domain 1, the competence questionnaire in domain 2, hypothetical scenarios for domain 1,
and then hypothetical scenarios for domain 2. The order of domain presentation was counterbalanced across participants. With the exception
of Dweck's TOI Scale, the order of the items within each questionnaire
was randomized. Parents were asked to report on demographic information at the end of the study.
Results
Factor structure
Because the PBAF is a new measure, we rst evaluated its structural
validity. Conrmatory factor analyses using LISREL 8.80 were conducted
on the items to determine which of the a priori hypothesized models
(based on our previous exploratory studies) best t the data. We used
listwise deletion because the missing data rate for these 12 items was
extremely small (0.01%). Three indices were used to evaluate the t of
the models: the comparative t index (CFI), the standardized root
mean square residual (SRMR), and the root mean square error of
approximation (RMSEA). To retain the hypothesized model, Hu and
Bentler (1999) recommend that the CFI should be above .95, the
SRMR should be below .08, and the RMSEA should be below .06.
Two competing models were tested in order to determine whether
parents held domain-specic beliefs about the xedness of their
children's abilities: a one-factor model where all items in both domains
loaded onto one factor, and a two-factor model where items loaded
onto separate math and verbal factors (see Figure S1, included in the
online supplementary materials). Since the math and verbal items had
the same wording, we covaried the errors between similarly worded
items in both models. The two-factor model t adequately well to the
2
In Studies 1 and 2, parents were also asked which behaviors they would be most and
least likely to use, but analyses pertaining to those items are not reported here.

data (2 = 117.96, p b .001, df = 47, CFI = .98, SRMR = .04,

RMSEA = .07, N = 299) and signicantly better than the one-factor
model (2 = 276.88, p b .001, df = 48, CFI = .95, SRMR = .06,
RMSEA = .14, N = 299), 2 = 158.92, p b .001, although even the
two-factor model had an RMSEA value that was just above Hu and
Bentler's (1999) recommended cut-off and a chi-square value that
was signicant.
Standardized factor loadings for items on the two-factor model
ranged from 0.51 to 0.84. A scale score was created for each domain
by averaging parents' scores on each item. All items were retained due
to their high loadings. Means and standard deviations of the individual
PBAF items are shown in Table 1, and means and standard deviations of
all composite variables are shown in Table S1. The means were low, indicating that overall, most parents do not view their children's abilities
as xed. However, there was sufcient variability in parents' responses
to examine relative differences in xedness beliefs. Skewness and kurtosis indices suggest that the distributions for both math and verbal
were approximately symmetric (skewness = .35, SE = .14 math;
skewness = .33, SE = .14 verbal) and platykurtic (kurtosis = .57,
SE = .28 math; kurtosis = .81, SE = .28 verbal). Mean values for
the PBAF-Verbal and PBAF-Math scales did not signicantly differ,
t(298) = .94, p = .35, d = .11, suggesting that parents viewed
children's abilities in both domains as equally xed. The PBAF-Verbal
and PBAF-Math scales were also highly correlated (r = .72, p b .001,
N = 299).
Validity
Convergent validity
Convergent validity of the scale was examined by investigating the
relation between the PBAF scale and Dweck's TOI scale for adults
(Dweck, 1999). Both scales measure people's beliefs about the xedness
of ability, so we expected participants' responses on the two measures
to be correlated. However, we did not expect a perfect correlation
because the scales measure xedness beliefs at different levels of
specicity. As expected, the two measures were correlated for both
math (r = .50, p b .001, N = 299) and reading (r = .45, p b .001,
N = 299). However, the magnitude of the correlations indicates that
they only shared about 2025% of their variance.
Discriminant validity
Discriminant validity of the scale was examined by correlating the
PBAF with parents' reports of their children's competence level in
math and reading. We did not expect parents' beliefs about the xedness of their children's abilities to be highly related to reports of their
children's competence, since it is possible to believe both that one's
child has high ability and that this ability cannot change. Consistent
with this expectation, there was no correlation between the PBAF
and the competence scale for verbal/reading (r = .07, p = .24,
N = 297) and a small, yet statistically signicant, correlation for math
(r = .13, p = .02, N = 297).
Relation between parents' beliefs and self-reported behavior
Correlations between all variables are shown in Table 3a; means are
shown in Table 2. Parents were much more likely to engage in masteryoriented as opposed to performance-oriented behaviors overall,
ts N 41.27, ps b .001, ds N 4.80.
To examine which set of parental xedness beliefs (specic or general) predicted self-reported behavior better than general beliefs
about the xedness of intelligence, we conducted three separate regression models for each behavior type within each domain. Because the actual age of the child that each parent imagined as a preschooler varied
considerably, we entered child age as a control variable into Step 1 of
all three analyses. For Step 2, self-reported behavior was regressed
onto xedness (PBAF) scores in the rst model, theories of intelligence

K. Muenks et al. / Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 41 (2015) 7889

Discussion

Table 2
Means and standard deviations of all composite variables.
Study 1

PBAF
Child competence
Mastery behaviors
Performance behaviors
Parental efcacy
Parenting activities
Dweck's TOI scale

83

Study 2

Math

Reading

Math

Reading

2.31 (0.92)
4.73 (1.35)
5.12 (0.70)
1.99 (0.78)

3.06 (1.16)

2.27 (0.92)
5.31 (1.45)
5.16 (0.72)
2.17 (0.75)

2.02 (0.76)
5.24 (1.03)
5.08 (0.57)
1.95 (0.75)
4.63 (0.69)
3.25 (1.00)
3.01 (1.10)

2.01 (0.73)
5.51 (1.43)
5.05 (0.61)
1.98 (0.60)
5.00 (0.74)
4.14 (0.90)

(TOI) scores in the second model, and both PBAF and TOI scores simultaneously in the third model. Analyses of self-reported behavior used
listwise deletion to deal with missing data (0.92%), which is reected
in the degrees of freedom for various analyses. As shown in Table 4a,
the two PBAF subscales (math and verbal), as well as the TOI scale, signicantly predicted self-reported parenting behavior for all combinations of behavior type and domain. Specically, parents' xedness
beliefs were negatively related to mastery-oriented behaviors and positively related to performance-oriented behaviors. Furthermore, when
PBAF and TOI scores were entered into the same model simultaneously,
only the PBAF scores remained a signicant predictor of self-reported
parenting behavior. This, in conjunction with the greater R2 for Model
1 compared to Model 2, suggests that parents' child- and domainspecic xedness beliefs accounted for a greater proportion of the variance in self-reported parenting behavior than general xedness beliefs.3
Although the PBAF predicted self-reported parenting behavior within
each domain (i.e., math and reading), it also predicted parenting behavior in the other domain as well. That is, the PBAF-Math signicantly predicted both mastery-oriented, = .43, t(293) = 8.06, p b .001,
and performance-oriented, = .35, t(293) = 6.46, p b .001, behavior
in the reading domain, and the PBAF-Verbal signicantly predicted
both the mastery-oriented, = .44, t(293) = 8.36, p b .001, and
performance-oriented, = .45, t(293) = 8.68, p b .001, behavior in
the math domain. This nding suggests that even though parents may
hold separate beliefs about the xedness of their children's math and verbal abilities, it is the shared variance of these beliefs that predicts selfreported parenting behavior in both domains (see General Discussion).

Study 1 established that parents' general beliefs about the xedness

of intelligence, as well as their child-specic beliefs about the xedness
of their children's math and verbal abilities, predict their self-reported
likelihood of engaging in mastery- and performance-oriented behaviors
when helping their children complete a difcult math or reading task.
Specically, the more parents believed that intelligence, math ability,
or verbal ability is xed, the more likely they were to engage in
performance-oriented parenting behaviors and the less likely they
were to engage in mastery-oriented behaviors. Importantly, parents'
child-specic xedness beliefs did not completely overlap with their
general xedness beliefs and proved a better predictor of their selfreported parenting behavior in both academic domains than their general beliefs about the xedness of intelligence. An important caveat is
that parents' child-specic xedness beliefs were not uniquely predictive of their parenting behaviors within a particular domain. That is, parents' beliefs about the xedness of verbal ability predicted their math
behaviors, and vice versa. This suggests that it is the child specicity of
the PBAF questionnaire, not the domain specicity, that made it a better
predictor of parenting behavior than the general theories of intelligence
questionnaire (see General Discussion).
The study also served to validate the Parental Beliefs about Ability
Fixedness scale (PBAF), a new questionnaire created to measure parents' specic beliefs about the xedness of their children's abilities.
The questionnaire showed good internal consistency as well as strong
content, convergent, and discriminant validity. And, most importantly,
the two-factor model t adequately well to the data (and better than
the one-factor model). This suggests that the parents held separate beliefs about their children's math and verbal abilities, although these beliefs were highly correlated and equally predictive of parenting behavior
across domains.
Although Study 1 provides strong evidence for the association between parents' xedness beliefs and self-reported parenting behavior,
one potential weakness of the study is that it used a sample that was recruited via the Internet, thus making it difcult to validate participants'
status as parents. This weakness was addressed in Study 2, which also
served to replicate and extend the ndings of Study 1.

Study 2
Sex, SES, and age analyses
There were no signicant differences on any measures between parents of boys and girls. There were also no signicant differences between
mothers and fathers on their PBAF scores for math or verbal. However,
there were parent sex differences in self-reported parenting behavior;
mothers were more likely to engage in mastery-oriented behavior,
t(292) = 2.26, p = .03, d = .26 [math], t(292) = 2.60, p =
.01, d = .30 [reading], and less likely to endorse performance behavior, t(292) = 3.12, p = .002, d = .37 [math], t(292) = 2.60, p = .01,
d = .30 [reading], than fathers in both domains. However, sex did not
moderate the relation between PBAF and parenting behavior.
Parent education, transformed into an ordinal variable as years of
education, was negatively related to use of mastery-oriented behavior
in the math domain (rs = .13, p = .02), but was not signicantly
related to any other variables. Parent income and child age were not
related to any variables included in these analyses.4

3
We also conducted these analyses with parent sex, child sex, child age, parent education, and parent income entered as covariates into each model. The addition of the covariates did not change the signicance of the TOI and PBAF as predictors.
4
We also examined moderation effects of age for Studies 1 and 2. Although some interaction terms were statistically signicant, the overall pattern of results did not change.
Some effects just tended to be stronger for parents of older or younger children (depending on the outcome).

Although replication studies indicate that Amazon Mechanical Turk

(MTurk) participants display a similar level of consistency across selfreport surveys as is typically seen in non-Internet studies (Buhrmester
et al., 2011; Mason & Suri, 2012; Rand, 2012), we sought to address concerns about the Study 1 sample by recruiting from a population of local
parents who are members of a university database. Parents in this population frequently travel to campus to participate in research studies
with their children, which helped increase our condence that they
are actually parents and that their responses on the questionnaires
accurately reected the perspective of parents.
Beyond replicating the results of Study 1 with a more reliable sample, the aim of Study 2 was to examine the association between parents'
xedness beliefs and the frequency with which parents engage in mathand reading-related activities in the home. As previously mentioned,
parents who frequently engage in activities that support early numerical development (Huntsinger et al., 2000; LeFevre et al., 2009) and
early language development (Ezell & Justice, 2000; Whitehurst &
Lonigan, 1998) tend to have children with relatively high math and literacy skills, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, there are no
existing studies that have looked at the relation between xedness beliefs (whether they be general or specic) and activity frequency. We
predict that parents who believe that their children's ability in a particular domain is xed will less frequently engage their children in mathand reading-related activities at home.

84

K. Muenks et al. / Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 41 (2015) 7889

Table 3a
Correlations of all variablesStudy 1.

1. TOI
2. PBAF Math
3. PBAF Verbal
4. Comp Math
5. Comp Read
6. Mastery Math
7. Mastery Read
8. Perf Math
9. Perf Read

.50**
.45**
.06
.07
.27**
.24**
.19**
.19**

.72**
.13*
.04
.45**
.42**
.43**
.35**

.08
.07
.44**
.42**
.45**
.47**

.36**
.10
.09
.09
.08

.17**
.18**
.16**
.20**

.79**
.39**
.36**

.45**
.44**

.80**

*p b .05; **p b .01. N = 300.

The nal aim of Study 2 was to examine parental efcacy as a potential mediator of the relation between xedness beliefs and parenting behavior. We predict that the less parents believe that their children's
ability in a particular domain is xed, the more they will think of themselves as capable of helping their child to learn and perform well in this
domain (i.e., the higher their parental efcacy) and, thus, the more likely they will be to engage in mastery-oriented parenting behavior and
the less likely they will be to engage in performance-oriented behavior.
Furthermore, parents with low xedness beliefs and high parental efcacy should be relatively likely to participate in math- and readingrelated activities with their children at home.
Method

included one parent of a 4-year old child and one parent of a 14-year
old child. Thus, the age of the child parents thought about ranged
from 4 to 14 years at the time of the survey, with a mean age of 8.12
years (SD = 1.45) and a median age of 8 years, with 1.2% of parents
thinking about a child who was preschool aged, 95.4% thinking about
a child who was elementary school aged, and 3.5% thinking about a
child who was middle school aged.
Measures
The measures were the same as in Study 1 with the addition of a
questionnaire measuring parental efcacy and an inventory that measured how frequently parents did math- and reading-related activities
with their children.

Participants
One hundred and nine parents were recruited from a large database
housed at a mid-Atlantic university. The database consists of thousands
of local families who have volunteered to be contacted to participate in
research studies with their children. For the present study, we recruited
parents of children ages 612 years through email. We did not recruit
parents of children under the age of 6 because it conicted with recruitment of another study we were conducting. We asked parents to ll out
an online questionnaire at home on their computer. Of the 109 parents
who initially participated, 23 were excluded from the analysis because
they failed to complete the rst questionnaire or gave nonsense responses to open-ended reliability check items. The nal sample thus
consisted of 86 parents (94.2% female). Parents ranged in age from 26
to 50 years (M = 41.0), and were primarily European American
(67.4%; 23.3% African American; 2.3% Asian American; 3.5% Hispanic;
3.5% other ethnicities). Eighty eight percent of parents had at least a
four-year bachelor's degree, and 79.1% of parents had a current household income above $50,000 per year. Most parents (79.1%) had only
one or two children. Parents were asked to think about only one of
their children when completing the survey; 54.7% of parents thought
about a male child and 45.3% thought about a female child. Although
we sought to recruit parents of children ages 612 years, we also

Parental efcacy
Parents reported on how efcacious they felt helping their children
learn math and reading. They were given ve items per domain and
asked to indicate their agreement with them on a 6-point Likert scale;
e.g., I know how to help my child do well in math; I don't know
how to help my child learn math (from 1 = Strongly Disagree to
6 = Strongly Agree). Some items were drafted at the same time as
the initial PBAF items and were included as a separate subscale during
the exploratory analyses (see Study 1). Minor wording changes were
made to the original items (e.g., in order to make them shorter or easier
to understand), and a few items were added and adapted (e.g., made
domain-specic instead of domain-general) from the Parent Perceptions of Parent Efcacy Scale (Hoover-Dempsey, Bassler, & Brissie,
1992). See supplementary materials for a list of all items. The scale
showed good internal consistency for math ( = .80) and reading
( = .86) in this sample. After reverse coding items that were phrased
in terms of low efcacy, responses were averaged to calculate participants' parental efcacy scores in each domain.
Parenting activity inventory
Parents indicated the frequency with which they engaged with their
child in 9 math-related (i.e., Using a calculator) and 13 reading-related

Table 3b
Correlations of all variablesStudy 2.

1. TOI
2. PBAF math
3. PBAF verbal
4. Mastery math
5. Mastery read
6. Perf math
7. Perf read
8. Efcacy math
9. Efcacy read
10. Activities math
11. Activities read
*p b .05; **p b .01. N = 86.

10

.53**
.53**
.51**
.41**
.09
.10
.46**
.45**
.17
.31**

.75**
.40**
.22*
.27*
.16
.52**
.52**
.22*
.35**

.42**
.36**
.21*
.13
.46**
.61**
.17
.21

.62**
.01
.09
.27*
.31**
.31**
.33**

.03
.13
.14
.25*
.18
.26*

.81**
.23*
.18
.07
.14

.26*
.22*
.02
.05

.65**
.32**
.40**

.18
.24*

.73**

K. Muenks et al. / Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 41 (2015) 7889

Table 4a
Regression analyses predicting self-reported parenting behavior from Theories of Intelligence (TOI) scale and PBAF questionnaireStudy 1.

Table 4b
Regression analyses predicting self-reported parenting behavior from Theories of Intelligence (TOI) scale and PBAF questionnaireStudy 2.

Type of parenting behavior

Model 1
PBAF
Model 2
TOI
Model 3
PBAF
TOI

Type of parenting behavior

Math mastery

Math
performance

Reading
mastery

R2

R2

R2

.20**

.19**
.45**

.08**

.42**
.06

Math
performance

Reading
mastery

R2

R2

R2

R2

.47**

.04**
.23**

.19**
.18**
.46**
.04

Math mastery

.22**

.06**

.19**

Reading
performance

.43**

.43**

.27**

.18**

.04**

.21**

85

.19**
.22**

.40**
.06

.48**
.03

Model 1
PBAF
Model 2
TOI
Model 3
PBAF
TOI

.16**

.07*
40**

.26**

.18
.41**

.21**
.31*
.07

.13
.01

.41**

.09

.02

.18**

.08*

R2

.36**

.27*

.51**

.14**

.01

.28**

Reading
performance

.10
.02

.20
.30*

.10
.04

*p b .05, **p b .01

Note: s are standardized. N = 294. Child age was entered as a control variable into Step 1
of each model.

p b .10, *p b .05, **p b .01

Note: s are standardized. N = 86. Child age was entered as a control variable into Step 1
of each model.

(i.e., Telling stories) activities in the past month (math and reading
activities were presented together in a random order; see online supplementary materials for a full list of activities). Parents responded on
a 6-point Likert scale from Did not occur (coded as 1) to Daily
(coded as 6). Items were averaged to calculate participants' scores.
Math-related and literacy activities from this scale came from the
Frequency of Literacy and Numeracy Activities scale used by LeFevre,
Polyzoi, Skwarchuk, Fast, and Sowinski (2010), which included three literacy items and twelve math-related items; three math-related activities
from LeFevre et al. (2010) were not included because we were most interested in activities that mainly engaged children's numeracy skills and
eliminated items that did not (e.g., making/sorting collections). One of
the authors with expertise in literacy development created the additional
reading activities by examining each math-related activity and developing a corresponding reading activity (e.g., Memorizing math facts and
Memorizing letters/sounds or sight words), as well as adding some additional activities. The reading activities were designed to capture all
areas of literacy (i.e., vocabulary, phonemic awareness, writing) relevant
to children of preschool ages based on research on early language and literacy development. All activities (for both math and reading) were similar in terms of scope and function. We included activities that were both
directly related to numeracy and literacy (e.g., learning simple sums and
spelling words) and indirectly related to numeracy and literacy
(e.g., measuring ingredients and telling stories; see LeFevre et al., 2010).
The scale showed good internal consistency for math ( = .83) and
reading ( = .85) in this sample. 5

Results

Procedure
Participants lled out a series of questionnaires online. They rst
completed Dweck's (1999) Theories of Intelligence (TOI) scale and
then completed the Parental Beliefs about Ability Fixedness (PBAF)
scale and efcacy scale for domain 1 (i.e., math), the PBAF and efcacy
scale for domain 2 (i.e., verbal/reading), the competence questionnaire
in domain 1, the competence questionnaire in domain 2, the hypothetical scenario for domain 1, the hypothetical scenarios for domain 2, and
the parent activity inventory. The order of domain presentation was
counterbalanced across participants. With the exception of Dweck's
TOI Scale, the order of the items within each questionnaire was randomized. Parents were asked to report on demographic information at the
end of the study.

Participants were also asked to rate how important they perceived particular mathand reading-related activities to be, but analyses pertaining to this questionnaire are not
reported here.

Means and standard deviations of the PBAF are shown in Table 1. The
math and verbal scales of the PBAF were combined to create separate
scores for each domain ( = .87 for math; = .85 for verbal). There
was no missing data. Means for the PBAF subscales did not differ,
meaning that parents tended to believe that math and reading abilities
were equally xed, t(85) = .14, p = .89, d = .03. Subscale scores were
highly correlated (r = .75, p b .001).

Relation between parents' beliefs and self-reported behavior

Parents were much more likely to engage in mastery-oriented as opposed to performance-oriented behaviors overall, ts N 31.08, ps b .001,
ds N 6.73. Correlations between all variables are shown in Table 3b;
means are shown in Table 2.
To examine whether PBAF scores predicted self-reported parenting behavior better than a general measure of beliefs about the xedness of intelligence, we conducted the same set of regression
analyses as in Study 1. Again, child age was controlled for in Step 1
of each regression analysis. As shown in Table 4b, the PBAF subscales
signicantly predicted parenting behavior for all combinations of behavior type and domain except for performance-oriented behavior
in the reading domain. Like the PBAF, the TOI scale (which served
as the more general measure of xedness beliefs) predicted
mastery-oriented behavior in both domains; in fact, it was actually
a stronger predictor of parenting behavior in these cases. However,
the TOI scale did not predict performance-oriented behavior in either domain, whereas the PBAF predicted performance-oriented behavior in math. This suggests that, although the PBAF was not as
strong a predictor of mastery-oriented parenting strategies (in contrast to Study 1), it predicted a broader array of parenting behavior
than the more general xedness measure.6
Once again, the PBAF subscales also predicted self-reported parenting behavior across domains. That is, the PBAF-Math marginally predicted mastery-oriented parenting behavior, = .21, t(85) = 1.95,
p = .06, in the reading domain, and the PBAF-Verbal signicantly predicted both mastery-oriented, = .42, t(85) = 4.20, p b .001,
and performance-oriented, = .21, t(85) = 1.97, p = .05, behavior
in the math domain.

6
We also conducted these analyses with parent sex, child sex, child age, parent education, and parent income entered as covariates into each model. The signicance of the TOI
and PBAF as predictors did not change, except for Model 3: the betas for both predictors
(TOI and PBAF) drop down to marginal signicance when the covariates were added.

86

K. Muenks et al. / Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 41 (2015) 7889

Relation between xedness beliefs and the frequency of activities in the

home
To examine the relation between parents' xedness beliefs and the
frequency with which they engage in math- and reading-related activities with their children at home, we conducted three separate regression models for each activity type (math and reading). Child age was
controlled for in Step 1 of each regression analysis. Activity frequency
was regressed onto PBAF scores in the rst model, TOI scores in the second model, and both PBAF and TOI scores simultaneously in the third
model. The results showed that the two PBAF subscales predicted the
self-reported frequency of both types of activities.7 In contrast, the
more general TOI scale only predicted the frequency of readingrelated activities, although it was actually a better predictor of these
activities than the PBAF-Verbal subscale (see Table 5 for the full set of
regression coefcients).
There was some evidence that the PBAF subscales predicted parents'
self-reports across domains. In particular, the PBAF-Math subscale
signicantly predicted the frequency of reading-related activities,
= .38, t(85) = 3.26, p = .002, and was in fact a stronger predictor than the PBAF-reading subscale. However, the PBAF-Verbal subscale
did not predict the frequency of math-related activities.

Parental efcacy as a mediator of the relation between beliefs and behavior

As shown in Table 2b, the PBAF was negatively correlated with parental efcacy in each domain, such that the more that parents' believed
that their child's ability was xed, the less capable they perceived themselves of helping their child to learn and perform well in that domain. In
turn, parental efcacy was positively correlated with mastery-oriented
parenting behavior and negatively correlated with performanceoriented behavior in both domains. To formally test whether parental
efcacy mediated the relation between xedness beliefs and parenting
behavior, we used SPSS to conduct a bootstrapping procedure with
1000 resamples. Compared to tests that assume a normal distribution
of indirect effects (e.g., the Sobel test), bootstrap methods are more accurate for assessing mediation in small- to moderately-sized samples
(see Shrout & Bolger, 2002). The procedure, developed by Hayes
(2013) and implemented in SPSS v20.0, allowed us to estimate the indirect effects of the PBAF on behavior in both domains (with parental efcacy as a mediator), as well as bias-corrected 95% condence intervals
for the estimates. Child age was entered as a covariate in all the mediation analyses. The intervals for the math mastery, math performance,
and reading mastery behaviors contained zero, which means that the
indirect effect was not signicant at = .05. However, the condence
interval for reading performance behaviors (which ranged from .01 to
.27) did not include zero, so the indirect effect can be considered significant at = .05 (Shrout & Bolger, 2002). Thus, it appears that parental
efcacy at least partially mediated the relation between child-specic
xedness beliefs about verbal ability and performance-oriented behavior in the reading domain.
Parental efcacy was also positively correlated with the selfreported frequency with which parents engage in math- and readingrelated activities in the home (see Table 3b). Thus, we conducted an additional set of analyses to determine if parental efcacy also mediates
the relation between xedness beliefs and activity frequency. The condence interval included zero for reading-related activities (.33 to .07),
but not for math-related activities (-.40 to -.01). Thus, it appears that
parental efcacy at least partially mediated the relation between

7
We also conducted these analyses with parent sex, child sex, child age, parent education, and parent income entered as covariates into the rst step of each model. For Model
1, the PBAF-Math was no longer a signicant predictor of frequency of math activities
when the covariates were added (p = .26). Additionally, in Model 3, the TOI dropped
down to marginal signicance (p = .06) with the addition of the covariates.

Table 5
Regression analyses predicting frequency of engagement in math and reading activities
from Theories of Intelligence (TOI) scale and PBAF questionnaireStudy 2.

Model 1
PBAF
Model 2
TOI
Model 3
PBAF
TOI

Math activities

Reading activities

R2

R2

.05

.14**
.23*

.03

.20*
.20**

.17
.05

.31**
.20**

.19
.07

.05
.29*

*p b .05, **p b .01

Note: s are standardized. N = 86. Child age was entered as a control variable into Step 1
of each model. Child age remained a signicant predictor of reading activities in all three
models.

child-specic xedness beliefs about math ability and the frequency of

math-related activities in the home.
Sex, SES, and age analyses
Parents of girls reported more frequent engagement in both math,
t(84) = 2.17, p = .03, d = .47, and reading, t(84) = 2.05,
p = .04, d = .45, activities at home than parents of boys. There
were not enough fathers in our sample to examine reliable differences
between mother and fathers.
Parent education, transformed into an ordinal variable as years of
education, was positively related to the TOI scale (rs = .29, p = .001),
but was not related to any other variables. Parent income, transformed
into dollars per year (by assigning a value of the median of that range to
every participant that fell within that range), was related positively to
the TOI scale (r = .24, p = .04) and negatively to engagement in
mastery-oriented behaviors in the math domain (r = .25, p = .03),
but was not related to any other variables.
Finally, we found a negative correlation between child age and
frequency of engagement in reading-related activities (r = .32,
p = .003). As discussed above, although parents were asked to imagine
their child as a preschooler when completing the hypothetical scenarios, they were not explicitly told in the instructions to think about their
child as a preschooler when completing the rest of the survey, and
thus presumably thought about their child at his or her current age.
Parents who thought about an older child reported engaging less frequently in reading activities in the home. Child age was not related to
any other variables.
Discussion
Study 2 replicated many of the results from Study 1. In particular,
parents' xedness beliefs predicted their self-reported parenting behavior in both domains. Unlike in Study 1, the pattern varied in terms of the
specicity of these beliefs. The more parents believed that their
children's abilities were xed, the less likely they were to engage in
mastery-oriented behaviors in both the math and reading domains
and the more likely they were to engage in performance-oriented behaviors in the math domain (but not the reading domain, contrary to
Study 1). Interestingly, parents' general beliefs about the xedness of intelligence were more predictive of their mastery-oriented behavior in
both domains than their child-specic beliefs, although these general
beliefs did not predict performance-oriented behavior in the math domain. Thus, in this study, parents' child-specic beliefs signicantly predict a broader range of self-reported parenting behaviors than general
beliefs about intelligence.
The results of Study 2 extend the Study 1 ndings in two important
ways. First, they show that parents' xedness beliefs predict the selfreported frequency with which they engage their children in math-

K. Muenks et al. / Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 41 (2015) 7889

and reading-related activities in the home. And, second, they show that
the relation between xedness beliefs and both parenting behavior and
parenting activities is, in some cases, mediated by their parental efcacy
(i.e., the belief that they are capable of helping their children to learn
and perform well in math and reading).
General discussion
The present studies are the rst to examine the association between
parents' naturally occurring (i.e., non-experimentally manipulated)
beliefs about the xedness of ability and their self-reported parenting
behavior. Results of both studies suggest that parents' xedness beliefs
were negatively associated with the likelihood of engaging in
autonomy-supportive and mastery-oriented parenting behaviors and
positively associated with the likelihood of engaging in controlling
and performance-oriented behaviors when their children struggle
with a math or reading task. Study 1 also validated a new instrument,
the Parental Beliefs about Ability Fixedness (PBAF) scale, which measures parents' child-specic beliefs about the xedness of math and
verbal ability. The math and verbal factors of the scale were found to
be distinct yet highly correlated.
One explanation for our ndings is that parents who believe that
their children's abilities are relatively xed (perhaps at a low level)
also believe that their children are unlikely to benet from masteryoriented behavior and thus resort to performance-oriented and controlling behavior in order to ensure that their children do not perform poorly. The same parents may also feel that engaging in math- and readingrelated activities with their children at the home is unlikely to improve
their children's math and verbal abilities. Conversely, parents who
believe that their children's abilities are relatively malleable and can develop with effort may think that the best way to help their children
achieve their goals is to allow them to learn from their own mistakes.
Thus, they are likely to prefer to engage in mastery-oriented and
autonomy-supportive behaviors. They may also believe that engaging
their children in math- and reading-related activities at home is a
good way to improve their abilities over time.
This explanation is consistent with the results of Moorman and
Pomerantz (2010), which showed that parents induced to hold an
entity (xed) mindset about a task displayed more controlling and
performance-oriented behaviors when helping their children than parents induced to hold an incremental (growth) mindset. However, this
study manipulated parents' beliefs about the intellectual abilities
assessed by a particular task as opposed to measuring their naturally
occurring beliefs about the xedness of intelligence (generally) and of
their children's math and verbal abilities (specically). In Study 1,
our newly constructed measure of child- and domain-specic xedness
beliefs (the Parental Beliefs about Ability Fixedness scale, or
PBAF) emerged as a stronger predictor of parents' mastery- and
performance-oriented parenting behavior in both the math and reading
domains than Dweck's (1999) general measure of xedness beliefs. Furthermore, in Study 2, the PBAF signicantly predicted parenting behavior in three out of four combinations of behavior type and domain,
whereas the general measure predicted behavior in only two. That is,
parents' general xedness beliefs strongly predicted their masteryoriented behavior in both the math and reading domains (in fact,
more strongly the PBAF), but did not signicantly predict their
performance-oriented behavior in the math domain (unlike the PBAF).
Together, the results from Studies 1 and 2 suggest that, in certain contexts, child- and domain-specic xedness beliefs are more strongly
predictive of parenting behavior than general xedness beliefs; and, in
other contexts, may predict a broader range of behavior.
An important question is why our child- and domain-specic measure of xedness beliefs appears to be a better predictor of parenting behavior in some cases than a more general measure of xedness beliefs.
Our results suggest that the predictive power of our measure is due
more to the fact that it is child-specic rather than domain-specic.

87

Although our conrmatory factor analysis suggests that parents' beliefs

about the xedness of their children's math and verbal abilities are distinct, these beliefs predicted parenting behavior across domains rather
than uniquely predicting behavior within a domain. That is, beliefs
about the xedness of math ability predicted parenting behavior in
the reading domain, and beliefs about the xedness of verbal ability predicted parenting behavior in the math domain. If the shared variance
between the math and verbal subscales of our measure is what predicted parenting behavior (as this nding suggests), then it is probably the
fact that our measure assesses parent's beliefs about the xedness of
their children's abilities that makes it more predictive (in some cases)
than a more general measure of xedness beliefs. For instance, parents
who generally believe that intelligence is xed may still act as if their
children's intelligence is malleable, particularly if they prefer to be
optimistic about their children's futures.
It is, however, worth noting that the domain-specicity of our measure may not have contributed to its predictiveness due to measurement error. That is, the fact that parents completed nearly identical
surveys (one for math and one for verbal) within the same session
may have resulted in carryover effects. A study that implemented a
between-participants design or that examined parents' actual behavior
(rather than their self-reported behavior) may have found that parents'
domain-specic beliefs uniquely predicted their behavior within that
same domain. Now that we have established the validity and reliability
of the PBAF, this possibility will be easier for researchers to explore in
the future.
Another contribution of the studies that is worth highlighting is
the negative association we found between parents' xedness
beliefs and the self-reported frequency with which they engaged in
math- and reading-related activities with their children at home. To
the best of our knowledge, this is the rst study to relate xedness beliefs (general or specic) to the amount of math and reading support
that parents provide to their children. We think this is an important
contribution given what is currently known about the constructive
role that math- and reading-related activities play in early numerical
development (Huntsinger et al., 2000; LeFevre et al., 2009) and early
language development (Ezell & Justice, 2000; Whitehurst & Lonigan,
1998).
Finally, in order to further explore the association between xedness
beliefs and both the quality and quantity of parenting behavior, we examined a potential mediator of this association: parents' self-efcacy for
being able to help their children learn and perform well in math and
reading. We found that the more that parents felt that their children's
verbal ability was xed, the less capable they thought they were of helping their child with reading, and the more likely they were to engage in
performance-oriented behaviors during a challenging reading task. We
also found that the more parents felt that their children's math ability
was xed, the less capable they thought they were of helping their
child with math and the less likely they were engage their children in
math-related activities at home. Together this suggests that, in some
cases, parental efcacy may serve as a more proximal determinant of
parenting behavior than xedness beliefs. However, it should again be
noted that parental efcacy was not a consistent mediator of the relation between xedness beliefs and parental behavior. Mediation was
not found for performance-oriented behavior in the math domain, for
mastery-oriented behavior in either domain, or for the frequency of
reading-related activities (although parental efcacy was correlated
with each of these outcomes). Additional research is needed to clarify
the conditions under which xedness beliefs have a direct or indirect effect on parenting behavior.
Although the studies make important contributions to research on
parenting and motivation, they have some limitations that may need
to be addressed in future studies. First, we used hypothetical vignettes
to measure parent's self-reported behavior rather than examining
their actual behavior. Thus, our results may have been inuenced by
parents' social desirability concerns. This inuence is perhaps evident

88

K. Muenks et al. / Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 41 (2015) 7889

in the mean levels of parents' self-reported master- and performanceoriented behavior. Parents thought they were much more likely to
engage in mastery-oriented behaviors compared to performanceoriented behaviors (which tend to have negative connotations).
Perhaps the disparity between mastery- and performance-oriented parenting behaviors would have been smaller if parents' behaviors had
been discreetly observed in a home context. Beyond social desirability
concerns, it may have also been challenging for participants to imagine
themselves within a hypothetical situation that involved interacting
with a preschool aged child, especially for the parents in Study 1,
many of whose children were well beyond preschool age. However,
we controlled for child age in all of our focal analyses, and still found a
consistent pattern of results. We also found that entering child age as
a moderator did not change the general pattern of results that we reported (see Footnote 4). Another reason that relying solely on parents'
self-reports can be problematic is that it can inate relations among
measures (e.g., DeYoung, 2006). In order to address this concern, future
studies should use multi-informant methods, such as child-report of
parents' behaviors in addition to parent-report. Researchers could also
observe parents' behaviors in the home or the laboratory in order to better capture the extent to which they use mastery- or performanceoriented strategies.
Demographically, our sample consisted of mostly mothers, although
Study 1 was much more gender balanced than Study 2. It is therefore
important to keep in mind when interpreting the results that these patterns may look different if our sample had consisted of mostly fathers.
Additionally, parents were not asked about their family composition
(i.e., whether they live in a one- or two-parent household), which
could certainly inuence their levels of autonomy supportive versus
controlling behavior. Future research could examine how these
demographic characteristics inuence the association between parents'
xedness beliefs and their behaviors.
A nal limitation is that measures of parents' beliefs and behaviors
were administered during a single testing session. Thus, it is possible
that parenting behavior actually predicts xedness beliefs and not the
other way around. However, previous research by Moorman and
Pomerantz (2010), which temporarily manipulated xedness beliefs
showed that xedness beliefs do, in some cases, lead to changes in parenting behavior. Future research can examine the causal inuence of
parents' xedness beliefs on their parenting behavior using longitudinal
designs.
Conclusion
Children often experience challenge, difculty, and even failure
when engaging in difcult academic tasks. How parents respond to
their children's struggles can potentially impact children's motivation
and success in school. When parents become frustrated and controlling,
children may learn to give up on challenging tasks. In contrast, when
parents allow children to make their own decisions and mistakes, children may learn to persist when they are confronted with challenges.
The current studies demonstrate how parents' beliefs might help to account for these differences in their behavior. Specically, parents' beliefs
about the xedness of their children's math and verbal abilities appear to
be important predictors of how parents will behave when their children
are struggling with an academic task. The current studies introduce a
new instrument, the Parental Beliefs about Ability Fixedness (PBAF)
scale, for measuring these xedness beliefs. Ultimately, the more that
we know about what drives parents' behaviors, the better prepared
we can be to educate parents about what types of beliefs and behaviors
will enhance their children's motivation and learning.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at http://dx.
doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2015.08.002.

References
Baker, L., & Scher, D. (2002). Beginning readers motivation for reading in relation to
parental beliefs and home reading experiences. Reading Psychology, 23, 239269.
Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T., & Gosling, S. D. (2011). Amazon's Mechanical Turk: A new
source of inexpensive, yet high quality, data? Perspectives on Psychological Science,
6, 35.
Chen, J. A. (2012). Implicit theories of ability, epistemic beliefs, and science motivation: A
person-centered approach. Learning and Individual Differences, 22, 724735.
Chen, J. A., Metcalf, S. J., & Tutwiler, M. S. (2014). Motivation and beliefs about the nature
of scientic knowledge within an immersive virtual ecosystems environment.
Contemporary Educational Psychology, 39, 112123.
Davis-Kean, P. E. (2005). The inuence of parent education and family income on child
achievement: The indirect role of parental expectations and the home environment.
Journal of Family Psychology, 19, 294304.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The what and why of goal pursuits: Human needs and
the self-determination of behavior. Psychological inquiry, 11, 227268.
DeYoung, C. G. (2006). Higher-order factors of the Big Five in a multi-informant sample.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 11381151.
Duncan, G. J., Dowsett, C. J., Claessens, A., Magnuson, K., Huston, A. C., Klebanov, P., et al.
(2007). School readiness and later achievement. Developmental Psychology, 43,
14281446.
Dweck, C. S. (1999). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development.
New York, NY: Psychology Press.
Ezell, H. K., & Justice, L. M. (2000). Encouraging the print focus of shared reading sessions
through observational learning. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 9,
3647.
Fredericks, J. A., & Eccles, J. S. (2002). Children's competence and value beliefs from childhood through adolescence: Growth trajectories in two male-sex-typed domains.
Developmental Psychology, 38, 519533.
Frodi, A., Bridges, L., & Grolnick, W. (1985). Correlates of mastery-related behavior: A
short-term longitudinal study of infants in their second year. Child Development, 56,
12911298.
Gottfried, A. E., Fleming, J. S., & Gottfried, A. W. (1994). Role of parental motivational practices in children's academic intrinsic motivation and achievement. Journal of
Educational Psychology, 86, 104113.
Grolnick, W. S., Gurland, S. T., DeCourcey, W., & Jacob, K. (2002). Antecedents and consequences of mothers' autonomy support: An experimental investigation.
Developmental Psychology, 38, 143155.
Gunderson, E. A., Gripshover, S. J., Romero, C., Dweck, C. S., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Levine, S.
C. (2013). Parent praise to 1- to 3-year-olds predicts children's motivational frameworks 5 years later. Child Development, 84, 15261541.
Gurland, S. T., & Grolnick, W. S. (2005). Perceived threat, controlling parenting, and
children's achievement orientations. Motivation and Emotion, 29, 103121.
Hayes, A. F. (2013). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis:
A regression-based approach. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Hess, R. D., & McDevitt, T. M. (1984). Some cognitive consequences of maternal intervention techniques: A longitudinal study. Child Development, 20172030.
Hoover-Dempsey, K., Bassler, O., & Brissie, J. (1992). Explorations in parent-school
relations. Journal of Educational Research, 85, 287294.
Hu, L. T., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for t indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A
Multidisciplinary Journal, 6, 155.
Hugh, L., & Romney, D. M. (1991). Parents' differential socialization of boys and girls: A
meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 109, 267296.
Huntsinger, C. S., Jose, P. E., Larson, S. L., Balsink Krieg, D., & Shaligram, C. (2000). Mathematics, vocabulary, and reading development in Chinese American and European American
children over the primary school years. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 745760.
Jose, P. E., & Bellamy, M. A. (2012). Relationships of parents' theories of intelligence with
children's persistence/learned helplessness: A cross-cultural comparison. Journal of
Cross-Cultural Psychology, 43, 9991018.
Karkkainen, R., Raty, H., & Kasanen, K. (2011). Parents' perceptions of the malleability of
their child's academic competencies. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research,
55, 213224.
LeFevre, J., Polyzoi, E., Skwarchuk, S., Fast, L., & Sowinski, C. (2010). Do home numeracy
and literacy practices of Greek and Canadian parents predict the numeracy skills of
kindergarten children? International Journal of Early Years Education, 18, 5570.
LeFevre, J., Skwarchuk, S., Smith-Chant, B., Fast, L., Kamawar, D., & Bisanz, J. (2009). Home
numeracy experiences and children's math performance in the early school years.
Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 41, 5566.
Maehr, M. L., & Zusho, A. (2009). Achievement goal theory. In K. R. Wentzel, & A. Wigeld
(Eds.), Handbook of motivation at school (pp. 77104). New York: Routledge.
Mason, W., & Suri, S. (2012). Conducting behavioral research on Amazon's Mechanical
Turk. Behavior Research Methods, 44, 123.
Miller, S. A. (1988). Parents' beliefs about children's cognitive development. Child
Development, 59, 259285.
Moorman, E. A., & Pomerantz, E. M. (2010). Ability mindsets inuence the quality of
mothers' involvement in children's learning: An experimental investigation.
Developmental Psychology, 46, 13541362.
Mueller, C. M., & Dweck, C. S. (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children's
motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 3352.
Murphey, D. A. (1992). Constructing the child: Relations between parents' beliefs and
child outcomes. Developmental Review, 12, 199232.
Pomerantz, E. M., & Dong, W. (2006). Effects of mothers' perceptions of children's competence: The moderating role of mothers' theories of competence. Developmental
Psychology, 42, 950961.

K. Muenks et al. / Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 41 (2015) 7889

Pomerantz, E. M., & Kempner, S. G. (2013). Mothers' daily person and process praise:
Implications for children's theory of intelligence and motivation. Developmental
Psychology, 49, 20402046.
Pomerantz, E. M., Moorman, E. A., & Litwack, S. D. (2007). The how, whom, and why
of parents' involvement in children's academic lives: More is not always better.
Review of Educational Research, 77, 373410.
Rand, D. G. (2012). The promise of Mechanical Turk: How online labor markets can help
theorists run behavioral experiments. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 299, 172179.
Reeve, J., & Jang, H. (2006). What teachers say and do to support students' autonomy during a learning activity. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98, 209218.
Rowe, M. L. (2008). Child-directed speech: Relation to socioeconomic status, knowledge
of child development, and child vocabulary skill. Journal of Child Language, 35,
185205.

89

Shrout, P. E., & Bolger, N. (2002). Mediation in experimental and nonexperimental studies: New procedures and recommendations. Psychological Methods, 7, 422445.
Stevenson, H. W., & Newman, R. S. (1986). Long-term prediction of achievement and attitudes in mathematics and reading. Child Development, 57, 646659.
Wentzel, K. R. (1998). Social relationships and motivation in middle school: The role of
parents, teachers, and peers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 202209.
Whitehurst, G. J., & Lonigan, C. J. (1998). Child development and emergent literacy. Child
Development, 69, 848872.
Worden, J. M., Hinton, C., & Fischer, K. W. (2011). What does the brain have to do with
learning? Phi Delta Kappan, 92, 813.