Slides for a talk researchED Malmo, 2018

1. What if everything you
knew about growth
mindsets and reslience
was wrong?
researchEd
Malmö 2018 @DavidDidau

2. Four legs growth, two legs fixed

3. Test your mindset!
• You have a certain amount of intelligence,
and you can’t really do much to change it.
• Your intelligence is something about you that
you can’t change very much.
• No matter who you are, you can significantly
change your intelligence level.
• To be honest, you can’t really change how
intelligent you are.
www.mindsetonline.com

4. What Dweck claims
“We found that if we changed students’
mindsets, we could boost their achievement.
More precisely, students who believed their
intelligence could be developed outperformed
those who believed their intelligence was fixed.
And when students learned through a
structured program that they could ‘grow their
brains’ and increase their intellectual abilities,
they did better. Finally, we found that having
children focus on the process that leads to learning
(like hard work or trying new strategies) could
foster a growth mindset and its benefits.”
Carol Dweck Revisits the ‘Growth Mindset’,
Education Week

5. Can you grow your brain?
• Jo Boaler: “When you make a mistake your
brain grows;” “synapses fire when you make
mistakes”
• 25 subjects trying to spot congruency:
MMMMM’ is congruent, ‘NNMNN’ is
incongruent
• Subjects give mindset questionnaire
• Subjects identified as having a growth
mindset showed more electrical activity of
the type they were looking for than did those
with a fixed mindset.
Mosel et al (2011)

6. Can we get cleverer?
• Is the brain “like a muscle”?
• Intelligence is made up of fluid & crystallised
intelligence
– Fluid: the ability to reason and solve problems
– Crystallised: the ability to access and utilise
information stored in long-term memory
• The more you know the cleverer you
become.

7. Can anyone do anything?
A A
B B
C C

8. Is growth always good?
• We are born with innate inherited
characteristics and ‘phenotypic plasticity’
• Some things are fixed, some are not…
• As we learn, we grow, but unless we ‘fix’
new learning into schemas, it will be lost
• Do we need to be both growth and fixed in
our mindset?

9. What mindset theory predicts
1. Having a growth mindset towards academic
study leads to better academic achievement.
2. Having a fixed mindset towards academic
study leads to poorer academic
achievement.
3. Giving students a growth mindset
intervention (which focuses on explaining
the neuroscience involved) improves
students’ academic performance.

10. What the evidence says
• Education Endowment Foundation’s
Changing Mindsets: no statistically
significant evidence of impact.
• Li & Bates (2017) “Mindsets and mindset-
intervention effects on both grades and
ability … were null, or even reversed from
the theorised direction. … This contradicts
the idea that beliefs about ability being
fixed are harmful.”

11. Dweck’s response
“We put so much thought into creating an
environment; we spend hours and days on
each question, on creating a context in which
the phenomenon could plausibly emerge …
Replication is very important, but they have to
be genuine replications and thoughtful
replications done by skilled people. Very few
studies will replicate done by an amateur in
a willy-nilly way.”
A Mindset ‘Revolution’ Sweeping Britain’s Classrooms May
Be Based on Shaky Science, BuzzFeed (14 January 2017).

12. The Bargh Fallacy
• Mindset in the Classroom: over 80% of
teachers have failed to make effective
changes in their classrooms.
• Is that because teachers are amateurs
trying to replicate Dweck’s esearch is a
willy-nilly way?

13. Good news?
• Yaeger et al (2018)”intervention reduced by 3%
the rate at which adolescents in the U.S. were off-
track for graduation at the end of the year” but only
in schools with “supportive behavioral norms”
• Sisk et al (2018) “Overall effects were weak for
both meta-analyses. However, some results
supported specific tenets of the theory, namely,
that students with low socioeconomic status or
who are academically at risk might benefit from
mind-set interventions.”

14. The false growth mindset
• If you don’t get the benefits of a growth
mindset it’s because you haven’t really got
a growth mindset
How Praise Became a Consolation Prize
• Does this make the theory unfalsifiable?

15. What about grit?
• Duckworth: ‘perseverance and passion for
long-term goals’
• The capacity to recover quickly from
setbacks
• Is this a global characteristic?

16. Does it make a difference?
• Credé et al (2017) grit was only modestly
correlated (0.18) with performance and
strongly correlated to the personality trait
of conscientiousness.
• What can we do to make students more
resilient in our classes?

17. What predicts resilience?
• Higher self-esteem
• Attribution of success to innate qualities
and failure to external factors
• Lower levels of perfectionism

18. Resilience is context dependent
• It’s normal to give up when we learn we’re
not very good at something
• Most people are resilient at things they know
they’re good at
• Being resilient at rugby does not predict
resilience in maths.
• The best way to increase students’ resilience
in your subject is to help them improve in the
subject they are studying.

19. Key points
• Growth mindset interventions can be hard
to implement and have small effects
• Fixed mindsets aren’t necessarily bad
• Beliefs are context dependent.

20. @DavidDidau
learningspy.co.uk
ddidau@gmail.com
“It is so easy to be wrong – and to persist in
being wrong – when the costs of being wrong
are paid by others.” Thomas Sowell