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How is your attitude limiting your potential? Are people with great achievements just born with greater potential? Or perhaps they worked harder to achieve their goals. Today we'll discuss Carol Dweck's theory of mindset, which argues that our mindset plays an important part in predicting achievement.
Changing our mindset can impact our motivation to learn, freepik.com
According to Carol Dweck, there are generally two ways you can view your abilities. Dweck's mindset theory summary can be condensed to:
You can either see your abilities through the lens of a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. Your mindset impacts how you react to successes and failures as well as your motivation to engage in new challenges that can help you develop.
A fixed mindset is characterised by the belief that our abilities can't be changed, they are determined by our genetics.
We are either talented or untalented and that determines our outcomes. A person with a fixed mindset that experiences a setback is likely to take it personally and believe that making a mistake means being less capable. People with a fixed mindset are therefore likely to avoid challenging activities that come with a risk of failure.
A growth mindset refers to a belief that our abilities are flexible and can change through practice.
A growth mindset involves seeing your mistakes as learning opportunities instead of indicators of your worth. People with a growth mindset will get excited by the prospect of being challenged and interpret failures in a more positive way. They are also more likely to try new challenging activities because they know that no one starts out as an expert and it takes effort to learn and develop.
As you can see, people with the growth mindset might be more motivated to learn compared to people with a fixed mindset, because in the process of learning, mistakes are inevitable. Greater motivation and a more positive attitude can in turn predict greater academic success.
Blackwell et al. (2007) found that across a sample of 373 seventh graders, students who believed that intelligence can change (malleable) achieved higher grades in the next two years of learning, while students that believed that our intelligence is fixed showed no improvement in grades in the next 2 years.
Your mindset can change depending on the context, it's possible for a person to hold a mindset more on the growth side for one activity, but more on the fixed side for another, due to previous experiences with those activities. If you were told by your teachers that you're not talented at math you might adopt a belief that to be successful at math you need to be talented.
Your mindset can change depending on the context, StudySmarter Originals, Alicja Blaszkiewicz
The good news is, our mindset can change, by being self-aware of how we react to new challenges and failure we can reframe our thoughts to see failure as an opportunity to learn rather than evidence for our lack of ability.
Blackwell et al. (2007) found that the children's grades improved after they were taught the growth mindset, while the control group that wasn't taught about the growth mindset showed a decrease in grades.
Dweck's theory highlights the importance of nurture, our environment, thoughts and the effort we put in when faced with new challenges. According to Carol Dweck, adopting a mindset that encourages growth and a positive attitude to learning is perhaps more important than our innate potential.
"It's not always people that start out the smartest that end up the smartest" - Carol Dweck
What we are praised for, often early in childhood, affects what mindset we develop towards learning.
If we are praised for our successes and labelled as "a bright child" we begin to only value experiences that confirm that we are talented instead of looking for learning opportunities that come with a risk of failing. In the long-term, that fixed mindset attitude is not beneficial for our development.
To facilitate a growth mindset, educators should praise learners for their efforts rather than for achievement. Focusing on rewarding effort encourages children to take risks, make mistakes and learn from them, it facilitates the development of persistence and resilience in learning, which is characteristic of the growth mindset.
Moreover, praising learners for the effort they put in instead of achievement can increase their sense of self-efficacy, which will make them more confident when approaching challenging situations in the future.
Self-efficacy refers to our belief that we are capable of achieving something. People with a good sense of self-efficacy are confident that they have the resources necessary to overcome challenges and succeed.
Could the solution to increasing students' performance be as simple as changing their mindset? On one hand, mindset theory could equip young learners with self-efficacy and self-esteem to help them succeed at school and later in life. On the other hand, many have criticised the theory for being too simplistic.
Let's consider some of the evaluation points of Dweck's mindset theory, analysing the educational implications, issues with reductionism, and mixed evidence.
Dweck's mindset theory provides educators with clear takeaways for their classrooms. Teachers should encourage effort instead of achievement, create a safe environment for making mistakes and always remind students that if they are not good at something, it only means that they are not good at it yet, but by all means can improve.
Many studies have supported mindset-based interventions in educational contexts to be effective in predicting performance even cross-culturally (Sisk et al., 2008).
Some critics of Dweck's theory argue that this approach reduces success to mindset and ignores other important factors like children's access to education, resources, socio-economic background and other privileges.
Approach only focusing on mindset can shift the blame on kids from disadvantaged backgrounds or with fewer resources, instead of acknowledging the role of an unfair system. If we assume that everyone's performance can be explained by their mindset then we need to assume all other factors are equal for everyone, which is often not the case.
While Dweck's studies showed the potential positive impact of mindset interventions on students' performance, many studies since have failed to replicate the results. The effects are usually smaller than predicted.
Data from 2 meta-analyses found the effectiveness of mindset interventions in schools to be weak (Sisk et al., 2008).
However, some still argue that in real life even small improvements make a difference. Overall, the effectiveness of mindset based interventions is still under question.
Changing mindsets may help those wishing to improve their abilities
Carol Dweck's theory argues people holding a growth mindset believe their abilities can change with practice, while people with a fixed mindset believe that their abilities can't be changed.
Fixed mindset and growth mindset.
People with a fixed mindset don't believe their abilities can improve and are less likely to engage in challenging activities, while people with a growth mindset believe their abilities can change with practice and see setbacks as an opportunity to learn.
Having a growth mindset means believing that you can always improve with practice, seeing setbacks as learning opportunities and being excited to take risks and engage in new, challenging activities. For example, taking art classes even if art is not something you are already good at.
1. Belief that our abilities are flexible.
2. Belief that everyone can improve with practice.
3. Seeing mistakes and failure as learning opportunities.
4. Being excited to engage in challenging activities.
5. Focus on the process of learning instead of outcomes.
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