A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement
David S. Yeager1*, Paul Hanselman2*, Gregory M. Walton3, Jared S. Murray1, robert crosnoe1, chandra Muller1, elizabeth tipton4, Barbara Schneider5, chris S. Hulleman6, cintia P. Hinojosa7, David Paunesku8, carissa romero9, Kate Flint10, Alice roberts10, Jill trott10, ronaldo iachan10, Jenny Buontempo1, Sophia Man Yang1, carlos M. carvalho1, P. richard Hahn11, Maithreyi Gopalan12, Pratik Mhatre1, ronald Ferguson13, Angela l. Duckworth14 & carol S. Dweck3
1. Introduction
The concept of Growth Mindset has revolutionized our understanding of human performance. Initiated by Carol Dweck, researchers have been investigating the role of students’ mindsets on their academic success for decades. They classify mindset as a spectrum between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Learners with a strong fixed mindset believe individuals have innate abilities that are unchangeable. They tend to avoid failure because it shows a lack of ability. On the other end of the spectrum, learners with a strong growth mindset believe ability is malleable and can be developed with effort. Having a growth mindset can motivate students to take on more rigorous learning experiences and persist when faced with difficulties. As with most concepts that exist on a spectrum, people typically have a mixture of both fixed and growth mindsets, and their tendency towards one side or the other can change depending on the day or the activity.
Embracing a growth mindset can have a profound impact on human performance in various aspects of life, including academics, career, and personal development by enhancing learning and skill development, boosting resilience and adaptability, driving innovation and creativity, and cultivating a culture of continuous improvement.
2. Overview of the Case
About 20% of students in the United States do not graduate high school on time which puts them at risk of poverty, poor health, and early mortality. The transition to secondary school is a critical period for adolescents. Grades often decline during this transition and do not recover, affecting their chance to enter college or university or succeeding in their advanced courses. Social-psychological interventions, like the growth mindset, can lead to sustained academic improvement through self-reinforcing cycles of motivation and learning-oriented behavior.
This groundbreaking National Study of Learning Mindsets revealed that a short, online growth mindset intervention in a nationally representative sample of high schools in the United States led to improved academic performance among lower-achieving students and increased enrollment in advanced mathematics courses.
The significance of this study lies in its focus on understanding the heterogeneity of effects of the growth mindset intervention in improving grades among different groups of students and under varying conditions. This is crucial because many interventions that initially show promise may not have the same impact when implemented on a larger scale. Investigating the factors that are contributing to this heterogeneity enables researchers to identify interventions that yield meaningful and replicable benefits for targeted groups.
The study overcame common challenges faced in analyzing intervention effects by using rigorous randomized methods, maintaining high fidelity of implementation across sites, and ensuring a representative sample of schools. this approach provides valuable insights into how different contexts can influence the impact of the growth mindset intervention.
3. Solutions Implemented
This research’s data was gathered from 65 that were selected among approximately 12,000 regular US public high schools regular public schools in the United States. The sample of 12,490 ninth-grade students in the research included various racial and ethnic backgrounds: 11% self-identifying as Black/African-American, 4% as Asian-American, 24% as Latino/Latina, 43% as white, and 18% from another race or ethnicity. About 29% of students reported that their mother had a bachelor’s degree or higher.
The intervention consisted of two self-administered online sessions that lasted approximately 25 min each and occurred roughly 20 days apart during regular school hours (Fig.1). The first session of the intervention covered the basic idea of a growth mindset. The second session invited students to deepen their. The control condition, focusing on brain functions, was similar to the growth mindset intervention but did not address beliefs about intelligence. The intervention and control sessions were delivered as early in the school year as possible, to increase the opportunity to set in motion a positive self-reinforcing cycle.
In this research two independent research companies were contracted to ensure the reliability and scalability of the study. ICF which worked blindly to the treatment conditions of the students draw samples, recruited schools, delivered interventions, and collected the data. Then the data was delivered to MDRC which also worked blindly, to produce an analytic grades file.
To estimate the average treatment effects and examine cross-school heterogeneity intention-to-treat analyses and multilevel mixed-effects models were used.
4. Outcomes
The study had several important outcomes. The primary focus of it was on the post-intervention grade point average (GPA) of ninth-grade students in core classes. The intervention targeted lower achieving students who were at a higher risk of academic failure. The growth mindset intervention was able to reduce the fixed mindset beliefs and improve the GPAs among lower achieving students.
The study also aimed to understand how different school contexts and student characteristics influenced the outcomes by investigating the heterogeneity of the effects of the intervention. Although intervention had consistent effects on changing mindsets across schools, it had variable effects on improving GPAs among lower-achieving students which indicates that there is a difference for potential schools in sustaining the intervention’s impact. This analysis also revealed two important factors in the effectiveness of the intervention: school achievement levels and peer norms. It was found that lower-achieving schools with more supportive norms and medium-achieving schools showed larger effects on GPAs, while higher-achieving schools exhibited smaller effects. Further, peer norms that was supporting the growth mindset belief system were helpful to enhance the intervention’s impact on GPA.
Moreover, the study explored the impact of the intervention on advanced mathematics course enrollment in the tenth grade. It was observed that the growth mindset intervention increased the likelihood of students taking advanced mathematics courses, particularly in higher-achieving schools.
5. Implications
This study showed that an hour and low-cost treatment can lead to significant improvements in grades for lower-achieving students. It also increased the number of students taking advanced math courses, which is very important since it increases educational attainment, and educational attainment is one of the learning predictions of longevity and health.
This research’s findings are a big step forward in the study of an intervention that could improve academic outcomes since the intervention worked very well in a diverse group with no training of teachers and the research was carefully planned and conducted by independent companies, which makes the results very reliable.
References:
Yeager, David S., et al. “A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement.” Nature 573.7774 (2019): 364-369.
Margulieux, L. E., Prather, J., Rahimi, M., & Uzun, G. C. (2023). “Leverage Biology to Learn Rapidly from Mistakes without Feeling like a Failure.” Computing in Science and Engineering, 25(2), 1-6. doi: 10.1109/MCSE.2023.3297750