"Wise" Growth Mindset Messages Help First-Generation College Students

I like where the growth mindset literature is headed. Based, in part, on thoughtful critiques (like those by Yan & Schuetze, 2023), mindset researchers are honing their interventions to be "wise", to be targeted to students who would benefit from them (e.g., first-generation college students in large courses), and to include learning strategy advice with their mindset messages, so students have specific recommendations on how to improve their learning. Canning et al. (2024) did a randomized controlled trial in an all-Zoom COVID class and found this kind of growth mindset intervention benefitted all students, both on an exam and on the final course grade. And, the effects were largest for first-generation college students. In addition, I really like that they used digital trace data to show that the treatment led to greater engagement with course content, which was a plausible mediator between the treatment and the course grade. All in all, I think these are encouraging findings, particularly for a low-resource intervention.