AUSTIN, Texas — Boosting academic success does not have to derive from new teachers or curriculum; it can also come from changing students’ attitudes about their abilities through a short online intervention, according to the latest findings from the National Study of Learning Mindsets published in Nature on Aug. 7.
The experimental study involved more than 12,000 ninth graders in a national, representative sample of 65 public high schools across the United States. It showed that an intervention emphasizing a growth mindset — the belief that intellectual abilities are not fixed but can be developed — can improve key predictors of high school graduation and college success, especially when a school’s culture supports the treatment message.
“The research cemented a striking finding from multiple earlier studies: A short intervention can change the unlikely outcome of adolescents’ grades many months later,” said David Yeager, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. “It also showed us something new: Higher-achieving students don’t get higher grades after the program, but they are more likely to take harder classes that set them up for long-term success.”
According to U.S. federal government statistics, nearly 20% of students in the U.S. do not finish high school on time. These students are also at an increased risk of poverty, poor health and early mortality. The transition to high school represents an important transition point in adolescents’ paths toward high school completion.
Building on prior research, researchers found that two 25-minute online sessions, administered at the beginning of high school, can help students develop a growth mindset by reshaping their attitudes about their abilities. Researchers found that both lower- and higher-achieving students benefited academically from the program, even into their sophomore year.
On average, lower-achieving students who took the program earned 0.10 higher grade points in core academic subjects such as math, English, science and social studies. Additionally, the intervention reduced the proportion of these students with a D or F average in these courses by more than 5 percentage points.
Researchers also found that the intervention increased the likelihood students took Algebra II or higher in 10th grade by 3 percentage points among both higher- and lower-achieving students.
“These effects are substantial when compared to the most successful large-scale, lengthy and rigorously evaluated interventions with adolescents in the educational research literature,” Yeager said. “They are particularly notable given the low cost and high fidelity of the online program. But the growth mindset program isn’t a magic bullet. Its effectiveness depends a lot on the school context.”
In medium- to low-performing schools with norms that encouraged students to take on more challenging coursework, lower-achieving students who received the intervention improved 0.15 grade points in core courses and 0.17 grade points in STEM courses.
“Motivation and learning don’t just happen in a student’s head; they depend on the resources and learning opportunities present in the school’s environment, including the extent to which challenging coursework is available to students,” Yeager said. “A mindset intervention is like planting a seed; it grows to fruition in fertile soil. Now that we have shown this in a national study, it will propel us into a new era of mindset research. That era will focus on both the mindset of the student and the culture and climate of the classroom. We have our eyes set on preparing teachers to support students’ beliefs that they can grow and learn.”
The Growth Mindset intervention tested in the study is freely available to schools in the U.S. and Canada at https://www.perts.net/orientation/hg.
The University of Texas at Austin is committed to transparency and disclosure of all potential conflicts of interest. The principal UT investigators involved with this research have filed their required financial disclosure forms with the university.
None of the researchers has reported receiving any research funding that would create a conflict of interest or the appearance of such a conflict.
a_cheesy_buffalo on August 9th, 2019 at 13:20 UTC »
John Hattie is a educational researcher from Australia (maybe NZ) who does meta-analysis of educational research. His research determined one of the greatest factors in student achievement is what he calls "student self-reported grades" which roughly translates into how effectively teachers set up a system where students understand the target they are expected to hit and their performance in regard to that target. Once students have that understanding, the major growth in achievement comes when they have a teacher who provides appropriate feedback in what it takes to move from where they are currently performing to performing at the level of the intended target.
PB34 on August 9th, 2019 at 13:20 UTC »
Frankly, I’m very skeptical of these results. It seems like whenever David Yeager or Carol Dweck study “growth mindset,” they always find that one or two 30-minute interventions meaningfully change student’s graduation rates and GPAs for months after (although the effect is often small).
Meanwhile, whenever OTHER researchers who DIDN’T come up with “growth mindset” interventions like Yeager/Dweck try to replicate those results, they tend to find NO effects of mindset interventions. Even if they have the kids take many lessons in growth mindset rather than a single 30-minute intervention, they tend to find no effects, eg:
https://www.tes.com/news/exclusive-growth-mindset-lessons-had-no-impact
EDIT: and here is a meta-analysis of 400,000 (!!!) students finding that growth mindset interventions do not seem to deliver consistent positive results: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617739704?journalCode=pssa
Past experience with research has shown me other examples where the researchers who came up with a theory keep finding significant results, but most researchers who try to replicate it find nothing. It’s usually not a good sign that the effects are real.
Best case scenario: Dweck and Yeager have some kind of personality trait that makes mindset interventions headed by them more effective (for whatever reason) than other researchers also trying mindset interventions. Maybe if other researchers gave up trying to replicate the results on their own snd ALWAYS hired Dweck or Yeager to run these interventions, they’d see better results.
More likely scenario: their results are not replicable.
mvea on August 9th, 2019 at 11:02 UTC »
The title of the post is a copy and paste from the first two paragraphs of the linked academic press release here:
Journal Reference:
David S. Yeager, Paul Hanselman, Gregory M. Walton, Jared S. Murray, Robert Crosnoe, Chandra Muller, Elizabeth Tipton, Barbara Schneider, Chris S. Hulleman, Cintia P. Hinojosa, David Paunesku, Carissa Romero, Kate Flint, Alice Roberts, Jill Trott, Ronaldo Iachan, Jenny Buontempo, Sophia Man Yang, Carlos M. Carvalho, P. Richard Hahn, Maithreyi Gopalan, Pratik Mhatre, Ronald Ferguson, Angela L. Duckworth & Carol S. Dweck.
A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement.
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1466-y
Nature, 2019
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1466-y
Abstract
A global priority for the behavioural sciences is to develop cost-effective, scalable interventions that could improve the academic outcomes of adolescents at a population level, but no such interventions have so far been evaluated in a population-generalizable sample. Here we show that a short (less than one hour), online growth mindset intervention—which teaches that intellectual abilities can be developed—improved grades among lower-achieving students and increased overall enrolment to advanced mathematics courses in a nationally representative sample of students in secondary education in the United States. Notably, the study identified school contexts that sustained the effects of the growth mindset intervention: the intervention changed grades when peer norms aligned with the messages of the intervention. Confidence in the conclusions of this study comes from independent data collection and processing, pre-registration of analyses, and corroboration of results by a blinded Bayesian analysis.