THE GROWTH MINDSET
Across the last hundred years, one influential idea has reshaped how we think about schooling. Where intelligence was once treated as something people are born with, it has come to be seen as flexible — a capacity we can help shape, given the right training. When Henri Vasseur devised the earliest intelligence tests, he shared the assumption of many nineteenth-century researchers: that cognitive ability was a fixed quantity waiting to be measured. That assumption came under attack in the early twentieth century, when reform-minded thinkers rejected the claim that a person's inborn ability determines their fate. Educators like Wallace Reinholt insisted instead that any child's mind could be nurtured and grown, provided the surroundings allowed it.
The theory of the 'growth mindset' is a fairly recent, and wildly fashionable, descendant of that outlook. Walk through many schools now and the corridors are lined with encouraging slogans, while assemblies dwell on the attitude of celebrated athletes who supposedly reached the top on self-belief alone. What teachers using the approach mostly try to do is shift how pupils read failure: rather than treating a poor result as proof of how able they are, students learn to see it as an opening to get better. The educationalist Marcus Reeve put it plainly decades ago: 'Being clever isn't a state you're stuck in — cleverness is something a person can acquire.'
All of this traces back to studies carried out in Copenhagen during the 1990s by the psychologist Petra Sundqvist. In one influential trial, she split a group of ten- to twelve-year-olds in two. Every child was told they had scored highly on a test; but where one half were commended for the cleverness behind the result, the other half were commended for how hard they had worked. It was the second half — the children in whom a 'growth mindset' had been fostered — who then proved much readier to tackle demanding new tasks. The first half, by contrast, gravitated only to challenges that posed no threat to their self-image. Having concluded that doing well or badly comes down to inborn talent, these pupils had absorbed a 'fixed mindset', and with it a dread of failure and a reluctance to try. Being praised for ability worsened their performance, whereas praise for effort signalled that improvement lay within reach.
Ironically, the single biggest obstacle to putting a growth mindset into practice may be the schooling system itself. In much of the world, the atmosphere in schools revolves around performance — an endless cycle of examining, measuring and ranking pupils — which is precisely the hallmark of the fixed mindset. And schools routinely send mixed messages: they will praise everything a growth mindset has to offer, and then, in the same breath, issue fixed target grades pegged to how pupils have performed.
Setbacks in the classroom aside, the founding research on the growth mindset has itself drawn sharp attack. According to the statistician Roland Achterberg, 'the way these studies are designed leaves so much room for manoeuvre that the same data could be made to back almost any conclusion you like.' Nils Bergstrom, a professor of psychology who has repeatedly attempted to reproduce Sundqvist's findings, keeps arriving at nothing: 'Those with a growth mindset are no better at weathering failure,' he observes, 'and children who have it aren't earning higher marks — not before our intervention study, and not after it either.'
None of this has escaped Sundqvist, who has earned considerable respect for engaging with the objections and revising her work in light of them. Her own position is that the theory has been misread and misused in numerous ways. She has warned, in particular, that schools are distorting her ideas by folding them into the self-esteem movement: 'To my mind the growth mindset is an instrument for learning and getting better. It was never meant simply as a way of making youngsters feel pleased with themselves.'
Yet something else may be going on. Perhaps the growth mindset stumbles in the classroom because we misunderstand what teaching and learning actually involve. Two of the approach's advocates, Adrien Delacroix and Louis Fenwick, contend that for such interventions to work they must be introduced with a light touch. The moment a teenager reads a teacher's intervention as a signal that they are being singled out as needing help, they argue, whatever benefit it might have had is likely to evaporate.
Much of what motivates a pupil comes down to the beliefs they already hold and the way they view themselves. Self-image and accomplishment do go firmly together, yet the evidence hints that achievement shapes self-image more forcefully than self-image shapes achievement. Standing up in front of a class and delivering a genuinely good talk is a real accomplishment — and that, in all likelihood, motivates far more powerfully than any hazy appeal to 'motivation' on its own.
The latest findings imply that growth mindset interventions are hardly the cure-all for learning that their champions make them out to be. In the laboratory the growth mindset looks like a sound idea; delivered through pointed interventions in a real classroom, it appears to fall flat. Nobody would deny that believing in one's own capacity to change is valuable for a student. The paradox is that this very belief is poorly served by head-on attempts to plant it.
More often than not, pep talks and inspirational posters achieve little beyond leaving students with a distorted picture of what success involves. Confidence is far more likely to grow if a pupil is taught a definite skill — composing a strong opening paragraph, for instance — and is then commended for the work that went into it, rather than being told how exceptional they are or how freely they can reshape their own brains. The growth mindset, perhaps, is at its most useful as an outlook to live by, not as something to be administered.
