Helping Our Students Believe They Can Improve

From the Center for Advanced Teaching at FSU

Helping Our Students Believe They Can Improve

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck developed the concept of “mindsets” as she studied the varying ways people cope with failure. Dweck was startled and intrigued by children who found failures to be stimulating opportunities for learning—challenges rather than embarrassing defeats. They relished feedback, as it gave them information to help them improve. Dweck calls this perspective, this conviction that “human qualities, such as intellectual skills, [CAN] be cultivated through effort,” a “growth mindset.” A person with a “fixed” mindset, on the other hand, believes that ability and intelligence are immutable. Dweck discovered that people with fixed mindsets tend to shy away from challenge, since they perceive struggle and failure as signs of low ability. They may be uncomfortable with corrective feedback, and quickly grow discouraged by difficult tasks. Since deep learning requires sustained effortful thinking, students who avoid challenges miss out on essential opportunities for growth and development.

Dweck and her team were able to observe how mindsets affected neural activity when they brought participants to a lab and monitored their brains as they attempted to answer difficult questions and got feedback. Participants with fixed mindsets only paid attention to feedback related to their ability; they wanted to know whether their answers were correct, but they ignored information that could help them improve, including the correct answer when they’d gotten it wrong. In contrast, people with growth mindsets focused on feedback that could help them learn. “Only for them was learning a priority,” Dweck concluded. These surprising findings may help us understand why students often don’t use the feedback we take such pains to provide. They also show that if we want students to learn from our feedback, and to embrace error and struggle, we need to cultivate growth mindsets through our classes.

Dweck and her team found that students’ fixed mindsets could in fact be shifted, increasing their motivation and achievement: “When students learned through a structured program that they could ‘grow their brains’ and increase their intellectual abilities, they did better.” Faculty shape students’ learning and development, so it’s important for us be aware of the research on mindsets and avoid reinforcing fixed ones. Our beliefs about intelligence and ability can affect our students’ achievement, so we have to resist categorizing students in terms of static intelligence or ability. For example, talking about “the smart kids” or “the A students,” versus the others (even amongst ourselves), can reinforce fixed mindsets. Instead, it’s essential that we communicate confidence that students can meet high standards through effort and growth.

Here are a few of the many other things we can do to cultivate growth mindsets:

• Teach students about mindsets. You can assign this excerpt from Dweck’s book or this video, and have students think about or discuss their own mindsets and how their beliefs about ability affect their habits and attitudes.

• Establish an environment where errors are a normal part of the learning process. Students are embarrassed to ask questions and make mistakes, so we need to welcome their exploration. You can also model the growth mindset by sharing your own struggles and how you overcame them.

• Design your course so that students experience effort leading to growth.

  • Provide opportunities to revise papers, earn back points on quizzes, or improve projects.

  • Create low-stakes assignments in which students must read feedback carefully and make a plan to use it to improve.

  • Be explicit about how you expect assignments (and feedback) to help students grow specific abilities through multiple attempts.

• Help students monitor their own learning and growth through reflection on their progress. If they find that they aren’t growing as much as they hoped, encourage them to assess their strategies and make a new plan to improve.