Students learn and achieve in systems. Our research should reflect this.

Careful debate and critique, when intended to advance understanding, are essential to “doing” scholarship. So, I’ve got no problem with Macnamara and colleagues (2023) critiquing mindsets (which they’ve worked on quite a bit), grit (which others have also critiqued), and the expertise literature (as an aside: I’m more bullish on deliberate practice than Macnamara et al. are). I’ve written about mindsets before and my thoughts haven’t changed, and they are a bit different than Macnamara and colleagues’ views (and that’s ok!). They attribute the appeal of grit, mindsets, and deliberate practice to cognitive fallacies, which may be true to some extent, but doesn’t mean the research is invalid. But, instead of focusing on that argument, which is worth reading and considering, I want to highlight something else in their article:

“New theories of achievement should acknowledge the influences of multiple factors, including heritable traits that might interact with the environment differently across developmental stages and social contexts. New theories of achievement do not need to model all pos­sible factors, but they should avoid simplistic explanations of achievement that overemphasize individual control” (p. 2)

This “systems” approach to studying education is wise. It’s unfortunate that much of the psychological research on education has been siloed into developmental (e.g., heritable traits, developmental stages), cognitive (e.g., individual control), or social/sociocultural (e.g., social contexts) psychology literatures. The reality is that people’s experience in the world (including their academic performance) spans these silos, and others also. We do students a disservice when we imply that an intervention in one silo (e.g., a cognitive intervention) is going to be the magical solution to all the problems, for all the students. A more dynamic, interactive, contextual approach is needed. And to the defense of mindset researchers, this has been their recent focus. We need more of that.