Growth Mindsets & Learning

How many times have you heard someone say, I'm just not good at math? Or, I'm terrible at this, I will never get it.

What about, oh, you're a natural at that, or, she's such a gifted musician.

These statements represent a point of view that assumes high performance and achievement are due mostly to talent, innate ability, or intelligence.

Students may even believe those are qualities we're either born with or not.

Stanford professor Carol Dweck and her collaborators call this perspective a fixed mindset.

The belief that our level of ability or intelligence is essentially unchanging, and that some simply have more than others.

On the other hand, you've probably also heard people say things like, I know I can get better at this.

Just give me a little more time.

Or, he got where he is through hard work.

Or, she's fearless.

She never seems to worry about making mistakes.

These statements reflect an alternate view, one Dweck refers to as a growth mindset.

The belief that ability and intelligence are changeable, and that we can increase them.

In other words, this view asserts that high performance is due mostly to hard work and persistence.

During the last 30 years, scores of research studies in school settings, often involving rigorous randomized trials, longitudinal tracking, and carefully-controlled interventions, have shown that student mindsets, their beliefs about intelligence and ability, have important implications for their academic performance.

And among the most striking conclusions is that students who possess a growth mindset, that is, students who believe their intelligence can grow as they learn, frequently perform at higher levels than those who don't.

Let's begin by looking at one of the studies demonstrating that growth mindsets help students learn.

In 2007, researchers from Stanford and Columbia Universities began to follow almost 400 students as they entered junior high school.

Now, any transition like that can prove difficult.

As students enter middle school, high school, or college, they're suddenly confronted with increasingly complex and unfamiliar work.

The whole experience can leave them feeling vulnerable and unsure.

Therefore, it's reasonable to conclude that student mindsets might have some influence on how well they transition.

To test this hypothesis, these brand-new seventh graders were given an assessment that measured, in a valid and reliable way, whether they possessed fixed or growth mindsets.

It's important to note the students in both groups had entered junior high with similar achievement scores in math grades in the years prior.

So, what happened to those students over the next two years? Those with growth mindsets showed continuous improvement, while those with fixed mindsets didn't.

Also, as shown in this graph, a gap in their math performances, as measured by grades and achievement, developed and continued to widen between the groups during the two years they were studied.

The results are striking and important to us as teachers.

What was it that helped some to excel in the midst of challenges, while others lagged behind? Through interviews with the students, the researchers discovered some noteworthy differences.

The growth mindset students valued hard work as a way to improve.

If they performed poorly, for example, they more often said they'd work harder the next time, perhaps also trying a different strategy.

And for them, mistakes and struggle along the way signaled something positive, that they were learning.

Grades were still important to them, sure, but it was the learning that mattered most.

On the other hand, the fixed mindset students felt that smart people didn't have to try hard, and for them, setbacks weren't chances to work harder or differently.

Instead, they were a signal of their low ability, something they felt they couldn't much change.

As a result, these fixed mindset students often responded very differently to difficult situations.

They often avoided challenges for fear of failure.

And if they did perform poorly, they were less likely to try harder the next time.

In some instances, they even said they would study less in the future.

Here's another crucial finding: Other studies have shown that fixed mindset students often hide their effort, worried it will confirm their low ability.

They tend to attribute their failures to external sources, placing the blame on teachers or tests rather than on themselves.

And they self-handicap.

If they don't try hard, then they'll have a comforting reason for later poor performance.

It was no surprise, then, that the two groups of students in the study performed quite differently over those two years, as you can see in the math grades depicted in the graph.

Notice that they begin from similar points, but diverge thereafter.

As a teacher, I find this research remarkable.

Few things are as important in life as pushing through challenges, learning from mistakes, and being willing to risk failure.

And yet some students, even some of my most capable, too often do just the opposite.

Dweck's framework helps make sense of why students respond in such starkly different ways.

If we believe that mistakes are chances to learn, we're more likely to be okay with failure and just try harder the next time.

But if struggling is a sign that we're not smart and we can't get better, that is a really scary message.

And so, fixed mindset students may spend enormous energy on ways to not feel bad about themselves, rather on learning and growing.

We've seen what can happen to students in just two years.

Imagine the cumulative effect of a lifetime of such decisions.

So, can we help our students who enter the year with fixed mindsets? The answer seems to be yes.

Many studies have focused on interventions, teaching students about the plasticity of the brain and malleability of intelligence, and that effort and hard work lead to higher performance.

These programs have been delivered in various ways, by teachers, peer mentors, and even online programs, such as Brainology, developed by Dweck and her colleagues.

The results from over 30 years all point to the growth mindset as a powerful factor in enhancing the performance of a wide variety of students of all ages and backgrounds.

Interventions have even been shown to help close achievement gaps for girls in math, and students of color in a number of academic contexts.

In his recent book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericcson summarizes a related line of research similar to the role of growth mindset in enhancing our students' academic performance.

Ericcson describes decades of research on the development of expertise, revealing that, in almost every domain, it is not innate talent or intelligence that mostly determines whether someone becomes an expert.

Rather, Erikkson demonstrates that the primary determiner of why some people develop into world-class experts is actually something he calls deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is a special form of learning, and includes regular spaced practice with timely and informative feedback, all invariably overseen by a mentor, coach, or teacher.

So, what's this have to do with our students? It's true, we're not developing world-class experts in various professional fields, at least not yet.

But we are striving to develop expert learners at whatever age we encounter them.

And by helping them develop a growth mindset, emphasizing hard work and effective effort, we significantly increase the chances they'll become high performers in school and beyond.

In other words, effective effort in the academic realm is analogous to deliberate practice in the development of expert performers.

Next, we'll discuss strategies for developing the growth mindset in our students.