The risk of such overhyping is that teachers and politicians begin to view ideas like mindset as a kind of panacea for education

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 152.   

A particularly influential example is the idea of the ‘growth mindset’. Having a growth mindset means believing that it’s possible, if you work hard, for your brainpower to improve rather than remain static throughout your life. What you want to avoid is a ‘fixed mindset’, where you have no faith that you can develop your abilities. The originator of the mindset concept, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, has published hundreds of scientific papers on it, but her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success is where the idea really hit the big time. She makes the notion of mindsets sound potentially life-altering. ‘The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life,’ writes Dweck. And: ‘When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world.’ Indeed, when you learn about mindsets, ‘You’ll suddenly understand the greats – in the sciences and arts, in sports, and in business – and the would-have-beens. You’ll understand your mate, your boss, your friends, your kids. You’ll see how to unleash your potential – and your children’s.’ 

 

Although it mainly consists of illustrative anecdotes, the success and influence of Dweck’s book (and of the idea of mindsets in general) is based on Dweck being a scientist. And not just any scientist: a world-leading professor at a top university, who is, as she writes at the very beginning of her book, sharing her scientific research. Dweck’s ideas have become a veritable craze in education: a 2016 survey of American teachers found that 57 per cent had received training on growth mindset principles, and that 98 per cent agreed that using ideas about growth mindset in the classroom would improve their pupils’ learning. Thousands of schools in the UK mention their growth mindset policy on their websites. 

 

What does the best research on growth mindset tell us? Over 300 studies on mindset were meta-analysed in 2018. The meta-analysts looked at studies on the correlation between people’s growth mindset (measured using questionnaires) and their school or university achievement, and also at experiments that tried to induce more of a growth mindset in students to try to improve their grades. In both cases, the effects were real – but weak. The correlational part found that mindset accounted for about 1 per cent of the variation in grades. The effort to induce a growth mindset in students, which compared an experimental group that received mindset training with a control group that did not, didn’t fare much better. If there was no mindset effect at all, we’d expect 100 per cent overlap between the distributions of school grades in these two groups (the distributions would be identical). And while the intervention shifted the grade distributions apart, it was only slightly: after mindset training, there was a 96.8 per cent overlap.  These aren’t big impacts. 

 

Even with such a small benefit, if you could roll it out across thousands or millions of students, then on aggregate you might do a decent amount of good.  But that’s not how Dweck chose to frame growth mindset, nor would that kind of framing have made parents and teachers flock to buy her book. Instead, she hyped up its individual effects, making it sound almost revelatory.  The risk of such overhyping is that teachers and politicians begin to view ideas like mindset as a kind of panacea for education, focusing time and resources on them that might be better spent on dealing with the complex web of social, economic and other reasons that some children fail at school. Reality can’t help but pale in comparison to the bombastic claims in Dweck’s book – claims, incidentally, that go against the intellectual humility that science demands. As we saw in the previous chapter, complex phenomena are made up of lots of small effects: scientists should know better than to promote the idea that there’s a single ‘quick fix’ for anything as complex as a child’s education.