What is a growth mindset?

Dear Aggie,

I have been hearing a lot about a "growth mindset". It sounds like a positive thing for our students. Do students just naturally have a growth mindset, or can we somehow foster it?

~Curious about Mindsets

Dear Curious,

You are right — a growth mindset is a fabulous attribute for a student to have. And the amount of buzz and research around growth mindsets is definitely growing, so it is hard not to at least have heard of growth mindsets. Given the wealth of information on growth mindsets, I can only offer a brief introduction here, but will offer some resources in case you wish to do more reading on your own.

Growth mindset has been championed and researched by Carol Dweck, and generally refers to the idea that students recognize that intelligence and abilities are not fixed, and can be improved by work and practice. This is in contrast to a fixed mindset, in which students believe that intelligence and abilities are pre-determined, and can not be changed (so for example, if a student is "smart" at math, any challenges or failures that they experience in a math course must mean that they are not smart enough, so maybe they will feel like they need to give up and/or cheat to be successful). Students with a fixed mindset resist challenges and become frustrated (to the point of giving up) when confronted with challenging assignments.

Students with a growth mindset embrace these challenges and the opportunity to learn from mistakes. Importantly, they persist and can succeed in their coursework. Fostering a growth mindset has been shown to improve learning, particularly for students who may be predicted to have lower outcomes (e.g., minoritized or first generation students).

So how can you promote a growth mindset with your students?

• Make assignments/tasks/projects meaningful to students. If students can see a personal, professional or academic relevance to a project, they are more likely to stick with it (and therefore learn something from it). In fact, several studies have shown that when students identified how course topics were personally relevant and useful, first generation students, minoritized students and students with low expectations of success outperformed their peers who were not asked to consider the personal relevance of the material [e.g., Hulleman and Harackiewicz (2009); Harackiewicz et al. (2016]) . 
• Break a large project/paper into smaller components. If students can successfully complete the smaller steps, they will develop more confidence in their abilities than if they had to tackle the whole project at once (and will stick with the steps to complete that challenging project).
• Reward meaningful effort (and not just performance). Give students a chance to learn from their mistakes (and improve a score). If your final exam is cumulative and they do well, let that score replace a lower score on an earlier exam. Or give students the opportunity to re-do an exam question to earn back some of the points they missed.
• When providing feedback, praise the effort and the progress that students have made (e.g."I see your hard work paid off on this assignment" vs."Wow, you did so well on this, you must be really talented".)

By fostering a growth mindset in our students, we are setting them up for enhanced learning in our own courses, but also for their future courses and careers.

~Aggie

Resources

Dweck, C., Walton, G., and Cohen, G. 2014. Academic Tenacity: mindsets and skills the promote long-term learning. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Retrieved from https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/manual/dweck-walton-cohen-2014.pdf

Dweck 2014. The power of believing that you can improve. TEDx Talk retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve?language=en

Harackiewicz, J. M., Canning, E. A., Tibbetts, Y., Priniski, S. J., & Hyde, J. S. (2016). Closing achievement gaps with a utility-value intervention: Disentangling race and social class. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111, 745–765.

Harackiewicz, J. M., Canning, E. A., Tibbetts, Y., Priniski, S. J., & Hyde, J. S. (2016). Closing achievement gaps with a utility-value intervention: Disentangling race and social class. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111, 745–765.

Hulleman, C. S., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (2009). Promoting interest and performance in high school science classes. Science, 326, 1410–1412.

Persellin and Daniels. A Concise Guide to Teaching With Desirable Difficulties. © 2018. Stylus Publishing, Sterling, VA.