Instead, teach themhow much fun a challenging task is, how interesting andinformative errors are, and how great it is to strugglewith something and make progress

instein, Mozart, or Michael Jordan—noone succeeds in a big way without enormous amountsof dedication and effort

Virtually all of the students loved it and reported (anony-mously) the ways in which they changed their ideas aboutlearning and changed their learning and study habits.

To do this, we have begun todevelop a computer-based program called “Brainol-ogy.” In six computer modules, students learn about thebrain and how to make it work better.

Much of the harm thatstereotypes do comes from the fixed-mindset messagethey send

Their studies andours also found that negatively stereotyped students(such as girls in math, or African-American and Hispanicstudents in math and verbal areas) showed substantialbenefits from being in a growth-mindset workshop.

Even thoughthey had learned many useful study skills, they did nothave the motivation to put them into practice

Can a growth mindset be taught directly to kids?

Intelligence praise, comparedto effort (or “process”) praise, put children into a fixedmindset

Almost 40 percent ofthe intelligence-praised children elevated their scores,whereas only 12 or 13 percent of children in the othergroup did so.

The children praised for their intelligence lost their con-fidence as soon as the problems got more difficult

The childrenpraised for their intelligence did not want to learn.

We didstudies like this with children of different ages and eth-nicities from around the country, and the results werethe same

almost 85 percent endorsed the notion that it was neces-sary to praise their children’s abilities to give them confi-dence and help them achieve

elf-esteem inmath seemed to become more important than know-ing math, and self-esteem in English seemed to become10111213

In the 1990s, parents and schools decided that the mostimportant thing for kids to have was self-esteem.

The Trident Reader

both groups had startedseventh grade with equivalent achievement test scores

they would sim-ply study more or study differently the next time

if youworked hard it meant that you didn’t have ability, andthat things would just come naturally to you if you did.

we find that students with a fixed mindsetcare so much about how smart they will appear that theyoften reject learning opportunities

hey don’t necessarily believe that everyone has thesame abilities or that anyone can be as smart as Einstein,but they do believe that everyone can improve theirabilities. And they understand that even Einstein wasn’tEinstein until he put in years of focused hard work

growth mindset were much more interested inlearning than in just looking smart in school.

As the students entered seventh grade, wemeasured their mindsets (along with a number of otherthings) and then we monitored their grades over thenext two years

A fixed mindset makes chal-lenges threatening for students (because they believethat their fixed ability may not be up to the task

studentswith this mindset worry about how much of this fixedintelligence they possess

Internal and External Motivation

These different beliefs, or mindsets, cre-ate different psychological worlds

Her article “Brainology”was initially published in Independent School magazine in 2008 and explains some ofthe benefits of considering mindsets in a learning environment.

with hermost significant contribution being the concept of mindsets.

is considered one of the world’s lead-ing experts in in the fields of motivation, personality, and social development, with hermost significant contribution being the concept of mindsets.