Dweck and her collaborators began studying how individuals unknowingly (or implicitly) assess their own intelligence and abilities through interaction and interpretation of their environment. These assessments ultimately influence the individual's goals, motivations, behaviors, and self-esteem. The researchers began by looking at students who were highly motivated to achieve, and students who were not. They noticed that the highly motivated students thrived in the face of challenge while the other students quit or withdrew from their work, but critically, a student's raw intelligence did not predict whether a student was highly motivated or not.[2] Rather, they discovered that these two groups of students held different beliefs (or implicit theories) about intelligence, which affected their classroom performance