As you know if you’re a regular reader of my newsletter or have read my book, I often refer to what’s called a “growth mindset” — an educational approach that involves praising kids for effort rather than ability.
If you’re not familiar with why a growth mindset is thought to be helpful or how to foster it, check out this newsletter I wrote a while back. But essentially, the idea is this: When kids are praised for effort rather than ability, and they connect their effort to their positive outcomes, they come to see ability and intelligence as malleable. They recognize that when they work hard and overcome challenges, they grow and become more skilled — and this recognition, supposedly, fosters motivation and resilience.
Today, I want to dig into a relatively new growth mindset controversy. It reached a fever pitch a few months ago when several new meta-analyses — research analyses that combine the results of multiple scientific studies —were published in an esteemed journal and came to vastly different conclusions.
One meta-analysis, conducted by Case Western University psychologist Brooke MacNamara and Georgia Tech psychologist Alexander Burgoyne, was particularly incendiary. Published in Psychological Bulletin, it concluded that “the apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias” — in other words, the science on growth mindset is flawed, and the approach doesn’t actually boost kids’ grades.
Dr. MacNamara and Dr. Burgoyne also accused some well-known growth mindset researchers, including Stanford’s Carol Dweck, of promoting growth mindset for financial gain and letting their biases shape their research. This is A Very Big Accusation to make in academia, and as you can imagine, it got people riled up.
The other meta-analysis, published in the same journal issue, had a rather different take. In it, researchers at North Carolina State University, Tulane University, University of North Carolina Charlotte, the University of Richmond, and Siena College analyzed the effects of growth mindset and “found positive effects on academic outcomes, mental health, and social functioning, especially when interventions are delivered to people expected to benefit the most.”
So is growth mindset a farce? Or does it help struggling students?
To get some insight on how to interpret these contradictory results, I reached out to four scientists with different perspectives on and relationships to the growth mindset research. I’m not going to try to explain everything I learned, because you’d need to a college-level statistics course to make sense of it all (I was struggling!!!), but I will do my best to sort through the confusion and share my take.
Let’s start with what everyone agrees on: The science on growth mindset is indeed flawed. Much of the early work was conducted decades ago, when research in psychology was a lot less robust than it is today. Among other things, researchers didn’t always do a good job of ensuring that the benefits they saw from growth mindset interventions were actually due to changes in mindset rather than due to other approaches embedded in the interventions (for instance, just encouraging kids to work harder). Sometimes, too, the people who were evaluating the effects of the interventions were the same people who were implementing the interventions, which invites bias.
“Are all of the studies perfect? No,” said Jeffrey Greene, an educational psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the new analyses. But, he added, “the research has gotten better over the years,” and some newer, more careful studies do still suggest growth mindset has benefits.
In a 2019 study published in Science, for instance, Dr. Dweck and other researchers compared the effects of two interventions on ninth graders from a nationally representative sample of U.S. schools. One was a short online growth mindset intervention that taught students that the brain can grow and improve when challenged; the other was a control intervention that taught students other facts about how the brain worked. After conducting rigorous statistical controls, the researchers found that, among lower-achieving students, the growth mindset intervention improved grades and increased student enrollment in advanced mathematics courses more than the control intervention did.
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Now let’s delve into why these meta-analyses differ — and what to make of their conflicting findings.
Let’s start with the MacNamara analysis that essentially concluded that growth mindset doesn’t work. The analysis had multiple parts to it, so I’m going to oversimplify, but their goal was to figure out if, on average, growth mindset interventions improved academic achievement. To do this, their analysis mixed findings from various studies and various student populations together to see how growth mindset interventions affected all students, when lumped together, on average. They didn’t find that growth mindset interventions had much if any benefit overall, especially when they evaluated only the most rigorous studies.
The other meta-analysis, on the other hand, tried to figure out when and where growth mindset interventions worked, and when and where they did not, using a slightly different data set. In essence, they did the the opposite of lumping all the students together. These researchers found that growth mindset interventions worked in some groups and not in others and that it helped struggling students the most — which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense. When kids are already getting straight A’s, growth mindset interventions aren’t as important or helpful, since students are already performing well. But when students struggle in school, the researchers found, growth mindset interventions may help.
“When you struggle, when you fail, when you're about to give up —that's when it's helpful to remember, “Okay, I can't do this yet, but if I keep going, I can get better,’” explained Allison Master, a developmental psychologist at the University of Houston who was not involved in the meta-analyses. (Full disclosure, Dr. Master has conducted studies on growth mindset and studied under Dr. Dweck.)
Interestingly, the “growth mindsets don’t work” meta-analysis found some evidence of these varied effects, too. When they broke down the various studies and looked specifically at how growth mindset affected students who got low grades, they found that the interventions did have some beneficial effects.
Okay, but there’s more. After those two meta-analyses were conducted, Elizabeth Tipton, a statistician at Northwestern University, and her colleagues learned about them and decided to conduct yet another meta-analysis of the growth mindset data. They looked at the same studies included in the “growth mindsets don’t work” analysis, but instead of lumping the data together, they teased the various effects apart more. They concluded that “there was a meaningful, significant effect of growth mindset in focal (at-risk) groups.” In other words, again, growth mindset did seem to help kids who weren’t doing well in school.
For you data geeks out there, I’ll note that this growth mindset controversy is a microcosm of a much broader controversy in the research world relating to meta-analysis best practices. Some researchers think that it’s best to lump data together and look for average effects, while others, like Dr. Tipton, don’t. “There's often a real focus on the effect of an intervention, as if there's only one effect for everyone,” she said. She argued to me that it’s better try to figure out “what works for whom under what conditions.” Still, I’d argue there can be value to understanding average effects for interventions that might be broadly used on big, heterogeneous groups, too.
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Then there’s the claim that growth mindset researchers are just out to make money.
Dr. MacNamara and her colleagues found in their analysis that when study authors had a financial incentive to report positive effects — because, say, they had written books on the topic or got speaker fees for talks that promoted growth mindset —those studies were more than two and half times as likely to report significant effects compared with studies in which authors had no financial incentives.
This is a difficult finding to evaluate. As researchers pointed out in another paper, scientists with financial conflicts-of-interest are often the thought leaders in a field, and they are also getting bigger research grants —which means that they are able to conduct more rigorous studies, which might lead to better results. Plus, there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg question: Are the researchers getting good results because they are financially invested, or are they financially invested because they’ve gotten good results?
The researchers I talked to who personally know Dr. Dweck said that they think she cares deeply about her work. “I've worked with people who are in it for the fame and the money or just who care a lot about the fame and the money — and that is not Carol Dweck,” Dr. Master said. Still, confirmation bias is real, and it’s typically not intentional. As other researchers have argued — and Dr. MacNamara pointed out to me —growth mindset is an intuitively appealing concept, which means evaluations of its effects might be especially susceptible to bias. This is a good point —and of course I am also susceptible to confirmation bias, since I’ve touted the benefits of growth mindset before, too.
Researchers and educators have raised other concerns about growth mindset interventions that I think are important to briefly mention here as well. There are concerns that some teachers who use growth mindset interventions might blame students for their mindsets if they don’t make progress — which is not how growth mindset should work, but failures of implementation happen.
Another critique is that a focus on mindset interventions could take attention away from addressing larger systemic factors that shape achievement gaps. And some researchers, including Luke Wood at San Diego State University, have argued that focusing solely on effort could be detrimental for children of color, who may benefit from being praised both for ability and intelligence. (Here’s a great article by journalist Gail Cornwall that delves into Wood’s concerns and recommendations in more detail.)
Do these critiques mean that we should stop using growth mindset?
I don’t think any of these are fatal flaws, and neither do most of the researchers I interviewed. “It's cheap and doesn't take much time. And it looks to me, from my read. that for some kids who need this, [growth mindset] really helps them to believe in themselves,” Dr. Tipton told me.
It’s worth pointing out that the current controversy revolves around the effects of growth mindset on academic achievement in particular. But growth mindset may have broader benefits. It might make children more motivated, or equip them with useful mental strategies, or help them think differently about failure — and all of these could be valuable independent of how they affect grades, Dr. Greene said.
“Is it the magic solution to all of our problems? No, it's not,” Dr. Greene said. “But it's hard for me to imagine it's a bad thing to say to a child, ‘If you work hard, if you get some help, if you can persevere through the difficulty, you'll get better.”
I’m inclined to agree, but I think we need to work hard to ensure that teachers —and parents — are using growth mindset strategies appropriately and not, say, blaming kids when they don’t improve. We need to be careful to ensure that marginalized students are made to feel capable, too. And we shouldn’t pretend that growth mindset is a panacea. Our educational system has deep systemic problems that require careful attention. We must embrace and address these challenges —perhaps with a growth mindset — too.
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