Brief growth mindset and mindfulness inductions to facilitate effort after negative feedback

Abstract

Negative feedback in academic settings is often unavoidable, although it may directly interfere with the ultimate goal of education, as setbacks can diminish motivation, and may even lead to dropping out of school. Previous research suggests that certain predispositions, inductions, and interventions might mitigate the harmful effects of negative feedback. Among others, growth mindset beliefs and mindfulness meditation were proposed as the most promising candidates that may help students to retain motivation. In a pre-registered, randomized experiment, we gave a disappointing evaluation to 383 university students in a bogus laboratory IQ test situation. Half of the participants previously received a growth mindset induction referring to intelligence as a malleable characteristic, while the other half received a fixed mindset induction referring to intelligence as a stable characteristic that cannot be changed. Then participants had a brief mindfulness meditation session or a control condition. Subsequently, they could choose to complete practice tasks before the final IQ assessment. The number of completed optional tests was used as a behavioral proxy for effort. The results showed no difference in effort for the growth mindset or the mindfulness meditation groups, compared to the other conditions. However, those that reported having higher dispositional mindfulness completed more optional tasks after mindfulness meditation. We concluded that our brief mindset and mindfulness inductions may not be adequate for everyone to alleviate the demotivating effects of negative feedback, but it does not necessarily mean that mindfulness cannot help implementing a growth mindset.

“Mindfulset”—Harnessing or unleashing learning potential through mindfulness mindset.

“…Therefore, we adapted the PERC task to have an appropriately difficult level for the university population. For this purpose, we selected Raven items used in our previous study (Nagy et al, 2022), accounting for the difficulty levels (% of successful completion rate) for each block determined by the original PERC study (Porter et al, 2020). Our primary outcome was the aggregate indicator of mastery behavior; we used the separate scores of the four dimensions: challenge-seeking, resilience, persistence, and effort as secondary outcomes.…”

An implicit measure of growth mindset uniquely predicts post-failure learning behavior

“…Matrices (e.g., Raven, 2000) with 45 seconds time limit per item (Nagy et al, 2021). We included 1 easy and 1 medium di culty item at the beginning of the block, in order to ensure that participants had the feeling that some items were possible to solve.…”

“…In both studies, participants were invited for an IQ assessment to the laboratory where they rst completed the PEP adapted to assess intelligence mindset. Then, all participants attempted to solve a block of very di cult IQ test items (e.g., Nagy et al, 2021). Subsequently, participants received performance feedback (which was low overall, creating a failure experience, which is a crucial theoretical condition for mindsets to become relevant (e.g., Yeager & Dweck, 2020).…”