Should we be teaching growth mindsets or not?

For such an intuitive idea, growth mindsets sure have sparked a lot of debate. The basic idea of mindsets is this: some students have a “growth” mindset, meaning they view intelligence as something you can increase through effort and guidance. Unfortunately, other students have a “fixed” mindset and believe you are born with a certain amount of intelligence that cannot change. The former belief leads to perseverance in the face of difficulty and subsequently better performance whereas the latter leads people to stop trying as soon as they encounter difficulty. “I’m not a math person,” or something like it, is something you’d hear from a fixed mindset person.

Carol Dweck created the idea, and over time she and her colleagues have argued a growth mindset is related to all kinds of desirable things such as motivation, effort, academic performance, and a variety of desirable life outcomes. And, importantly, they have argued that short interventions can induce growth mindsets, which would be, as the kids used to say, “big if true.”

Over time, the research led to a lot of attention and the creation of a company to market mindset interventions. Check out their “The Science” page:

That’s a bold claim. Yet, after decades of Dweck and colleagues’ research claiming strong effects of brief growth mindset interventions, recent meta-analyses have argued those effects are, in actuality, nil. Nothing. Bupkis. Dweck and colleagues disagree. So, should we be spending time and resources to teach students about growth mindsets or not?

Veronica Yan and Brendan Schuetze have written a terrific article responding to this mindset controversy. If you’re into deep thinking about whether and how science works, it’s really worth a read. The article is a model for engaging in thoughtful critiques (of both Dweck’s work as well as the meta-analyses arguing against it) and also for demonstrating what productive scholarly discourse should look like. They avoid polemics, insinuation, and over-simplification. Instead, Yan and Schuetze make a nuanced, well-supported argument regarding what is clear and not so clear about mindset research, and where the field needs to go next to make progress.

My take? It’s tough for me to imagine there’s something bad about telling children, “Listen, if you work hard and get help when you need it, you can improve your performance.” At the same time, I suspect the overall effect of changing a person’s mindset isn’t nearly as large as Dweck and others thought it was 20 years ago. But, to their credit, they are revising their views and doing the work to figure out whether and why mindset interventions work, for whom, and under what conditions. Like lots of seemingly useful things in education, the answer to whether mindsets are “worth it” is: likely yes, under the right conditions, but it’s not a magic solution to all the challenges in teaching and learning.

I’d advise educators to not only teach students that intelligence can grow and change, but to model and support that view in how they shape their classroom cultures and assessments. As Walton and Yeager (colleagues of Dweck) have written, interventions designed to change how people think will likely have little effect unless the world around those people also allows them to reach their true potential.