Growth Mindset

Laura Simon

Dr. Gray

English Methods

4 October 2017

Growth Mindset

Definition:

        Growth mindset is a concept coined and studied by Stanford University psychologist Carolyn Dweck, Ph.D. that refers to a person’s belief in his or her own ability to learn and develop skills, regardless of natural ability, through determination and hard work.  Having a growth mindset is not an all or nothing frame of mind; it falls on a continuum that can vary day to day and per area of ability.  The other side of the continuum is a “fixed mindset,” which refers to a person’s belief that his or her abilities are static, set by natural ability and unaffected by any effort put forth by the individual.  

Summary of Research:

TED (2014). Carol Dweck: The power of believing that you can improve. [image] Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve?utm_campaign=tedspread--a&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare [Accessed 18 Sep. 2017].

In this TED talks video, Carol Dweck discusses growth mindset, the idea of “yet” and “not yet” providing students with a future to strive toward, and how teaching students to adopt a growth mindset impacts the students’ education.  She starts with an example of her study in which she gave a classroom of 10-year-old students some challenging, above grade level problems to solve.  Surprisingly, some of the students reacted positively, noting the enjoyment they felt at attempting a challenge.  These students would be considered to have a growth mindset.  Alternatively, many of the students exhibited distress at their perceived failure to solve the challenging assignment.  These students showed signs of having a fixed mindset.  She cited the negative impacts of a fixed mindset in terms of learning and success with the following studies: Cheat vs. Study (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007), in which it was shown students with a more fixed mindset were likely to cheat over study next time after “failing” a test; Find Someone Worse (Nussbaum & Dweck, 2008), in which students with a fixed mindset were likely to try to find someone that performed worse to make themselves feel better after a perceived failure; and a number of studies have shown that students with a fixed mindset were likely to run from difficulty in the future (Hong, Chiu, Dweck, Lin, & Wan, 1999; Moser et al., 2011; Mueller & Dweck, 1998; Nussbaum & Dweck, 2008).  Testing has even shown that there is a significant difference in brain activity between students with growth vs. fixed mindsets when confronted with a mistake (Moser, Schroder, Heeter, Lee, & Moran, 2011).

Dweck goes on to describe ways to help students shift their fixed mindsets into growth mindsets.  One way is to praise students for effort, improvement, and the process they use instead of natural ability.  One study created a math game that rewarded students for working hard, trying multiple approaches, and getting better instead of correct answers (O’Rourke, Haimovitz, Ballweber, Dweck, & Popovic, 2014).  The results showed even more effort, more progress, more strategies, and more determination from the students in the face of a challenging question.  Another study showed that when students are taught the science of growth mindset, that when they learn new, challenging information, it makes the neurons in their brains stronger and raises their long-term intelligence, their performance improved while the control group declined (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007).  Dweck goes on to describe a few groups of students notorious for underachieving that rebounded into some of the highest achieving after integrating growth mindset into the curriculum.  

Krakovsky, M. (2017). Stanford Magazine - Article. [online] Alumni.stanford.edu. Available at: https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=32124 [Accessed 20 Sep. 2017].

This article discusses the conceptualization and development of the growth mindset theory.  According to the article, she was led to the question of ‘what makes some children persevere in the face of failure while others quit?’ whilst studying learned helplessness in animals.  This is when she first tested the idea that the difference between perseverance and helplessness was whether the failure was believed to be caused by a lack of ability or a lack of effort.  The results of this research reshaped the study of the attribution theory, taking the focus away from how attributions were formed and toward the aftereffects of attributions.  

        Through her research, Dweck discovered that students’ goals were a critical piece to understanding their thought processes.  Those that have the goal to learn are more likely to appreciate a challenge.  Those that just want to succeed are more worried about how they look than whether they learn.  They tend to avoid a challenge in order to preserve their image.  This research branched into achievement goal theory, a new field of educational psychology.  Through the studying of student’s goals, it was discovered that those students with the goal to learn thought of “ability” as an evolving skill, thus a having a “growth” mindset; students with the goal to perform thought of ability as a natural talent, thus having a “fixed” mindset.  After proving that students can be taught to adopt a growth mindset, Dweck, alongside Lisa Sorich Blackwell, put her focus into developing Brainology, software designed to simulate their classroom workshop to train kids to have a growth mindset.