Metacognition and growth mindset

Metacognition involves a heightened awareness of your thinking processes or anything related to them. For example, you are a metacognitive learner when you are actively aware of the environment, conditions, processes, and strategies that motivate and enable you to learn.

You are also a metacognitive person when you apply a basic understanding of your brain to strategies and activities for personal development and growth. Becoming a metacognitive individual is the necessary foundation for developing and achieving your personal brain fitness and life goals. We can use some of what we learn about neuroplasticity to improve our health and our lives.

Growth mindset

Generally speaking, mindset refers to a predisposition or fixed mental attitude that determines how an individual will respond to and interpret situations and make decisions. See growth mindset.

Psychologist Carol Dweck from Stanford University distinguishes between fixed mindset, the belief that an individual's talent and success depend on innate ability, and growth mindset, the belief that talent and success are the outcome of learning, training and determination ("grit").

Individuals with fixed mindsets fear failure, whereas growth mindset individuals see failure as learning and a step toward success.

"In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it" (Dweck, 2012). While an individual may not be aware of his/her mindset, it is apparent in their attitudes, behaviours, and reactions to situations, in particular to failure.

Carol Dweck on the Complexity of Implementing Growth Mindset 

'There was evidence that growth mindset had been tested and shown to work in ways that were meaningful to students – OK, that was the evidence, but the evidence did not speak to how to implement it in the classroom,' she explains. 'That part was not yet evidence-based. Research takes place over many years. We continue to probe and validate and extend it.'

https://www.tes.com/news/carol-dweck-where-growth-mindset-went-wrong