Assessing Gifted Students' Beliefs about Intelligence with a Psychometrically Defensible Scale

The psychometric qualities of the six- and eight-item implicit theories of intelligence scales that Dweck suggested were compared using a confirmatory factor analysis with data from 239 gifted students (100 students in Grades 5-7, 139 students in Grades 8-11). The results indicate that the six-item scale fits the data better than the eight-item scale. The factor reliabilities of data from the six-item scale were.853 for the entity theory and.878 for the incremental theory. We found evidence for measurement invariance across age and gender using measurement and structural invariance tests. Using the scale to investigate the beliefs about intelligence of gifted students and the association between their beliefs about intelligence and goal orientations, we found that the higher the incremental theory held by gifted students, the higher the learning goals they tend to pursue. Older students had a greater tendency to hold an entity theory than younger students.