Browsing by Author "Suomalainen, Henrietta"

This master’s thesis is a case study. The aim of this study was to find out what kind of qualities would differ in the drawings of the intelligent and the ordinary person made by the pre-primary students. The study also aimed to discover if the mindset theory by Carol Dweck (2016) would be visible in the drawings and in the interviews. The study was based on the mindset theory. The theory divides people in two groups based on their views about the malleability of their intelligence. The one’s with fixed mindset and the others with growth mindset. Fixed mindset means that intelligence is seen as a fixed entity that cannot be changed. The growth mindset means that one can develop and become more intelligent by putting effort on the learning. The mindset theory is connected to learning, setting goals and surviving from set-backs. The method used in this study was qualitative dominant mixed method research. 25 pre-primary students aged six to seven took part in the study. The students first drew two pictures: one with an intelligent person and one with an ordinary person. This part of the study was based on the previous studies by Räty, Komulainen, Skorokhodova, Kolesnikon and Hämäläinen (2011) and Räty and Snellman (1997). Then the children took part in a group interview. The interview was a focused interview, and the questions were based on the mindset theory. The pictures and the interview were analyzed using theory based content analysis. The pictures were partly analyzed using quantitative analyzing methods. The pre-primary students see intelligent and ordinary person in a quite similar way. Only a few things separated the persons from one and another. The differences were about the choices on clothing, accessories or hairstyle. More imaginative features were involved in only a few pictures. The drawing task was hard for the children so the mindset theory did become visible especially in the situation where the children had to figure out how to draw the intelligent person. The children with fixed mindset did not want to start drawing, said that their drawing was no good or tried to hide it from other children. The children with growth mindset started to draw immediately, had a clear vision and did not care about other children’s opinions. The end result was that although there was not a clear difference between the drawings, the task itself showed how the mindset theory is valid also within the pre-primary students.