Mind-Set Interventions Are a Scalable Treatment for Academic Underachievement

Abstract

The efficacy of academic-mind-set interventions has been demonstrated by small-scale, proof-of-concept interventions, generally delivered in person in one school at a time. Whether this approach could be a practical way to raise school achievement on a large scale remains unknown. We therefore delivered brief growth-mind-set and sense-of-purpose interventions through online modules to 1,594 students in 13 geographically diverse high schools. Both interventions were intended to help students persist when they experienced academic difficulty; thus, both were predicted to be most beneficial for poorly performing students. This was the case. Among students at risk of dropping out of high school (one third of the sample), each intervention raised students' semester grade point averages in core academic courses and increased the rate at which students performed satisfactorily in core courses by 6.4 percentage points. We discuss implications for the pipeline from theory to practice and for education reform.

Growth mindset is not associated with scholastic aptitude in a large sample of university applicants

“…While the association between mindset and goal achievement was previously shown to be weak (Burnette et al, 2013), our study presents a large amount of new data suggesting that the association may be even weaker than previously thought. Given that recent large scale experiments suggest that learning growth mindset improves academic achievement (Paunesku et al, 2015;Yeager et al, 2016a, b), our study does not invalidate the notion that implicit theories of intelligence might be a promising target for educational interventions. However, it suggests that mindset might not be as useful for predicting future success or that its predictive abilities are at least limited to specific circumstances.…”

“…Participants' mindset was measured using a Czech translation of a scale with two items: "I can learn new things, but I can't really change my basic intelligence" and "I have a certain amount of intelligence and I really can't do much to change it" (Paunesku et al, 2015). The items were introduced by the question: "To what degree do you agree with these statements?"…”

“…Supporting this possibility, some studies demonstrated that interventions teaching the malleability view of intelligence positively affected academic achievement among high school (e.g., Paunesku et al, 2015;Yeager et al, 2016a) as well as university students (Yeager et al, 2016b). …”

“…The error bars represent 95% confidence intervals of the means. Lower scores correspond to a more fixed mindset.Some previous research (e.g., Paunesku et al, 2015) suggests that mindset may have an effect on achievement mostly for those whose achievement is generally lower. This means that the relationship between mindset and the GAP test results could differ depending on the performance on the test.…”

Self-affirmation facilitates minority middle schoolers' progress along college trajectories

“…Randomized experiments conducted during transitions to middle school (13)(14)(15), high school, and college (11,12,16,17) have shown that brief interventions that support adaptive psychological processes improve grades and school retention. They do so by encouraging students to reflect on core values (13)(14)(15), by assuring them of their belonging in school (11,12), by highlighting the personal relevance of academic coursework (16), or by cultivating the belief that intelligence is malleable rather than fixed (11,17). No study, however, has shown that a psychological process altered at one transition has persistent and direct causal effects on outcomes at later transitions and in new institutions years later, and, if this does occur, how.…”