This cheap, brief “growth mindset” intervention shifted struggling students onto a more successful trajectory

By guest blogger Bradley Busch Can a brief video telling students that it’s possible to improve their intelligence and abilities make much difference to their educational outcomes? And if fostering a “growth mindset” in this way does make a difference, does it benefit all students and schools equally? Research on growth mindset over the past twenty years has progressed from experiments in a laboratory into real world settings, such as classrooms. This has shown that having a growth mindset leads to a small but positive improvement in grades and better mental health. But to date, little work has examined whether a brief mindset intervention is likely to help some adolescents more than others, especially those at greater risk of poor outcomes later in life. Keen to rectify this, 23 of the leading researchers in this field, including the likes of Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth and David Yeager, recently collaborated on a large study which they released briefly as a pre-print (they are now revising the manuscript pending submission to peer review). As a Chartered Psychologist who delivers mindset workshops, I believe the preliminary findings are extremely promising. The study involved 12,542 ninth grade students aged 14 to 15-years-old from 65 different US schools. They watched two 25-minute videos, roughly twenty days apart, early in the school year. Half the students, randomly determined, watched two growth mindset videos featuring clips about the brain that explained tha...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Educational guest blogger Source Type: blogs