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Mental contrasting facilitates academic performance in school children

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Abstract

Two brief intervention studies tested whether teaching students to mentally contrast a desired future with its present reality resulted in better academic performance than teaching students to only think about the desired future. German elementary school children (N = 49; Study 1) and US middle school children (N = 63; Study 2) from low-income neighborhoods who were taught mental contrasting achieved comparatively higher scores in learning foreign language vocabulary words after 2 weeks or 4 days, respectively. Results have implications for research on the self-regulation of commitment to solve assigned tasks in classroom settings, and for increasing academic performance in school children in low-income areas.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the teachers, students, and families at the schools where we conducted this research for their support and participation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10003, USA

    Anton Gollwitzer & Gabriele Oettingen

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Teri A. Kirby

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Angela L. Duckworth

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Gabriele Oettingen & Doris Mayer

Authors
  1. Anton Gollwitzer
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  2. Gabriele Oettingen
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  3. Teri A. Kirby
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  4. Angela L. Duckworth
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  5. Doris Mayer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gabriele Oettingen.

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Gollwitzer, A., Oettingen, G., Kirby, T.A. et al. Mental contrasting facilitates academic performance in school children. Motiv Emot 35, 403–412 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-011-9222-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-011-9222-0

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