Skills, Beliefs & Behaviors

Mindset: Caveats

Mindset interventions might be ultimately ineffective if students are mostly operating in fixed mindset environments:

  • From the literature on mindset, we understand that student behaviors may be more tightly correlated with the instructor’s mindset than students’ own mindsets (Park et al., 2016; Rattan et al., 2012). Therefore, it is not enough for faculty and instructors to express a desire to have a growth mindset: their classroom practices and behaviors should support the development of a growth mindset as well, which will likely require some form of faculty awareness and training. Instructor/faculty mindset training would be more difficult to implement than training students directly.
  • Most mindset interventions do not directly address the concept of mindset or even mention the name, but instead target the underlying beliefs that intelligence and ability are malleable (Yeager & Walton, 2011). We do not know yet know if a more ‘overt’ mindset intervention could prevent students in fixed mindset environments from adopting a fixed mindset orientation.
  • Programs and processes that emphasize grades too much (ex: entrance into medical school) or cultures in which extreme time constraints are the norm (ex: the culture of course and extracurricular overload common at MIT), can contribute to adoption of a performance goals rather than mastery goals. Although no data currently exists on the relationship between competency-based curriculums and mindset, in principle, curriculums that focus on the attainment of well-articulated skills and knowledge should promote a growth mindset.

Long-term effects of scalable interventions are unknown: The most scalable interventions on mindset (i.e. those delivered online) are brief and their effects have only been assessed for a short period of time (a semester to approximately one year). We do not know if the effects of these brief interventions can persist over long periods of time (ex: four undergraduate years and beyond) (Orosz, Péter-Szarka, Bőthe, Tóth-Király, & Berger, 2017).

An overemphasis on teaching about mindsets can backfire if it comes at the expense of:

  • teaching students specific strategies to improve performance and learn from feedback. Adoption of a growth mindset is helpful, but not sufficient, to overcome academic challenges. In addition, changing external conditions that contribute to students’ performance, such as well-designed curriculums, good instruction, and nurturing learning environments where all feel welcomed, are essential to make sure our students are maximizing their potentials.
  • changing inequities in our society that make it more difficult for certain students to succeed.