Skills, Beliefs & Behaviors
Mindset: Overview
What is it
Research indicates students’ beliefs about the nature of intelligence and ability significantly shape their response to academic challenges (Dweck, 2006; Yeager & Dweck, 2012). Mindsets are the implicit theories that individuals hold about the malleability of human characteristics. The mindset framework summarizes research on how people think, feel, and act in response to failure and challenging experiences. Individuals who believe that intelligence and ability are largely immutable (‘fixed mindset’) respond to failure by withdrawing, disengaging, or by persisting with the same set of strategies despite their prior demonstrated ineffectiveness. On the other hand, individuals who believe intelligence and ability can be substantially increased through experience and effort (‘growth mindset’), often react to academic challenge by allocating more effort, experimenting with new approaches, and seeking feedback. Moreover, students with a growth mindset focus less on past successes and seek increasingly challenging tasks that promote skill development and acquisition (‘mastery goals’). Students with a fixed mindset tend to select safer learning experiences that help them validate their intelligence, and avoid exposing deficiencies to others (‘performance goals’) (see Table 1). In addition to understanding how mindset help shape skill and performance, research has also examined the contributions of mindsets on peer conflict, race/ethnic relations and self-regulation (Dweck, 2000; 2012).
Mindsets occur in a continuum between the fixed and growth extremes. Importantly, mindsets are domain specific. For example, a student can have a growth mindset towards the development of coding skills, but demonstrate fixed mindset beliefs towards public speaking. Others might have a growth mindset towards intellectual ability but demonstrate a fixed mindset regarding personality traits. Even within a certain domain, an individual might initially approach a particular challenge by exerting effort and seeking help (growth mindset), but may subsequently perceive setbacks as a diagnosis of low inherent ability (fixed mindset).
Although we do not have data on how many students at MIT might exhibit fixed mindset orientation, we certainly know that many students arrive to MIT riding on years of success and ‘intelligence praise’ by parents, teachers, and mentors. Many students encounter their first real academic struggles at MIT. Studies that probe the origin of mindset inclinations show that when children are given lots of praise for their intelligence as opposed to receiving praise for using strategies and allocating effort (‘process praise’) they are more likely to adopt a fixed mindset orientation (Gunderson et al., 2013; Mueller & Dweck, 1998).
Why is it important?
Effect of mindsets on individuals:
Although students with fixed mindsets can succeed academically and experience high self-efficacy (see Self-efficacy) when their studies are going well, a fixed-mindset approach can handicap individuals when confronted with serious setbacks. Fixed-mindset thinking can result in students:
- interpreting failure as an inherent inability to improve in a challenging domain, which in turn can cause students to 1) feel inadequate (‘imposter syndrome’) and unable to succeed (a loss of self-efficacy), 2) drop out of a course, major or educational experience, and 3) abandon developing skills that could be beneficial for academic and professional growth.
- underutilizing available resources that could help them overcome the challenging experience (Y. Hong, Chiu, Dweck, & Lin, 1999). Those with a fixed mindset may view the utilization of resources as a confirmation of inadequacies. Additionally, it is hard to see the utility of said resources if one believes that skill in the challenging domain cannot be substantially developed.
- failing to seek feedback from peers and mentors and/or discarding helpful constructive feedback from others. Measurements of brain potentials in individuals who have committed a mistake during a task reveal that those with a growth orientation had considerable higher signals for a neural process involved in the correction of mistakes than individuals with a fixed mindset. More importantly, after mistakes are pointed out, individuals with a growth mindset do better in subsequent tasks than those who are more fixed-oriented (Mangels, Butterfield, Lamb, Good, & Dweck, 2006; Moser, Schroder, Heeter, Moran, & Lee, 2011).
- experiencing increased anxiety and depression. A link between poor performance and beliefs about innate nature of ability promotes maladaptive perfectionism (Shih, 2011). Fixed mindset is a negative predictor of academic performance and a positive predictor for depression (Da Fonseca et al., 2009). More recently, a meta-analysis exploring the relationship between mindset and mental health showed that students with a fixed mindset experience a higher prevalence of mental health problems (anxiety, depression, aggression or conduct disorder) (Schleider, Abel, & Weisz, 2015).
Effect of mindsets on representation and academic belonging:
Research indicates that disciplines that more commonly attribute success to raw, intellectual brilliance have fewer women and African-American students enrolled in PhD programs (Leslie, Cimpian, Meyer, & Freeland, 2015). Leslie et al. surveyed 1820 faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students from 30 different disciplines (STEM & social sciences/humanities) across high-profile public and private universities. Participants were asked questions related to their own discipline. Other hypotheses that have been used to explain academic gender gaps were examined, but a fixed mindset was the only one that had 1) a strong correlation with female underrepresentation and 2) was predictive. This effect was mediated by stereotypes about women and academic ability: “disciplines that emphasized raw talent were more likely to believe that women are less suited for high-level scholarly work and rated themselves as less welcoming to women by the participants” (Leslie et al., 2015).
Mindset training is an antidote to the effects of stereotypes on academic achievement. Students who experience stereotype threat (anxiety experienced when an individual fears his/her performance might confirm a stereotype, whether the individual believes in the stereotype or not) tend to underperform under evaluative situations. Underrepresentation in an academic discipline, class, or learning experience can further exacerbate the effects of stereotype threat by causing students to feel that they do not belong and are inherently not able to succeed in the discipline (see Academic Belonging for more). Teaching students that intelligence/abilities are malleable has been shown to bridge the academic gap for women and unpresented minorities (Aronson, Fried, & Good, 2002; Good, Aronson, & Inzlicht, 2003) and to increase their sense of belonging (Good, Rattan, & Dweck, 2012).