Kim Mills: Are you good at math, or stumped by basic algebra? Hopeless at spelling, but a great test taker? You may have a sense, perhaps instilled early on at school, of your academic ability as a fixed and immutable trait. Something that you were born with, like the color of your hair or eyes.
But over the last several decades, research has suggested that thinking of intelligence this way can sap students’ motivation in school and contribute to racial, gender, and socioeconomic achievement gaps. After all, a kid might think, “If I’m bad at math, why should I sign up for an advanced class? Or if I’m not really smart enough to be in college, what’s the point of trying?” In contrast, having a growth mindset, a belief that intelligence and ability can develop and increase with practice, can help keep students motivated when they face challenges.
The concept of a growth mindset has made the leap from the psychology lab to popular culture and even become something of a buzzword in education. But it’s also attracted controversy over how much of a difference growth mindset really makes to student achievement. So where is the research now? Can relatively simple interventions, which are exercises really, that reframe students’thinking about their own abilities, help close achievement gaps? Whom do these interventions help most, and how can they be deployed effectively?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. David Yeager, an associate professor of developmental psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and cofounder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute.
Dr. Yeager began his career as a middle school English teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but became interested in the science of helping students thrive and returned to graduate school to study with Dr. Carol Dweck, the founder of growth mindset theory. Over the past two decades, Dr. Yeager has studied how to design and implement effective growth mindset interventions, a type of mental exercise that we’ll talk more about that help teens overcome psychological barriers that stand in the way of their success. He often focuses on helping students during times of transition, such as the transition to middle school, high school or college. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Yeager.
Dr. David Yeager: Thank you for having me.
Mills: Let’s start with a definition, which we frequently do on Speaking of Psychology. What is a growth mindset? How does it differ from a fixed mindset?
Yeager: So a fixed mindset is the belief that intellectual ability is just fixed. You have a certain amount of it and that’s it. That’s who you are and that’s who you’ll stay. That mindset can make challenges and mistakes more threatening, because they can reveal deficiencies in your permanent ability. A growth mindset is the belief that students can develop their intellectual abilities through hard work, good learning strategies, and lots of help from others and lots of support and opportunities. So in a growth mindset, taking on challenges and learning from mistakes become ways to develop your abilities.
Mills: And keeping with explaining our terms, what is a growth mindset intervention? Intervention is one of those words that psychologists like, but I’m not sure that it’s really understood by nonpsychologists.
Yeager: A growth mindset intervention simply exposes young people to the true idea that all learning changes us, and that learning is possible throughout the lifespan. The way we often accomplish this is by drawing on neuroscience actually. We explain that learning happens in the brain, that the brain grows new connections when it learns new challenging concepts. And furthermore, that changes in our knowledge and in our brain are possible under the right conditions and with the right support.
So how do you teach this information? Well, you can’t just give a dry lecture on neuroscience, that doesn’t work. Instead, what you need to do is to invite young people into the world in which those ideas could be true. And the way you do that is by providing short but compelling summaries of the scientific information from, and we summarize real studies from neuroscience and the science of human learning. But more importantly, we give them stories, stories of people who in the past have encountered difficulty, have overcome that difficulty by continuing to persevere and develop their skills. And where it becomes true in their experience that learning is possible.
The last thing we do in the intervention is we ask participants to tell their own stories. How could this information help you to address and overcome your own intellectual challenges? Imagine you’re a future student coming to ninth grade, starting algebra 1, wondering if you’ll ever figure out how to factor trinomials. In that moment when you feel dumb at math, how could you think back on the idea that intelligence is actually not fixed, it’s something that can be developed? And what we find is that students love the idea of using their story to inspire future students who might go through the same trials and tribulations. So the intervention is not months or weeks long, it’s intentionally short and efficient. So that way adolescents have the chance to read the ideas, understand them, and internalize them, without it feeling like people are telling you what to think or telling you how to behave.
Mills: What were the changes that you were able to measure when you administered this intervention? I know that you had a very large cohort of people you brought together and administered the intervention and you came up with some pretty interesting results.
Yeager: Yeah, that’s a great question. So in the early days, in the laboratory studies, researchers would give participants a growth mindset article and writing exercise, or a fixed mindset writing exercise and article. And then maybe moments later asked them how much they believed intelligence could change, they’d measured their mindset. And maybe they’d give them a really hard puzzle to solve and tell them it’s measuring their intelligence and see if people quit that puzzle or not.
Once we started realizing that this idea had a little bit more power to potentially shape real-world behavior, we started going into real high schools and delivering this intervention and immediately afterward giving them a choice. The choice was, would you like to do more math problems today that will be very difficult, will push you to your limits, but might teach you something new? Or would you like some math problems that are very easy because they cover content you’ve already mastered, but you’ll get to look smart because they’re the kind of problems that you know the answer to?
And what we found is that first of all, American teenagers in a very large study we did overwhelmingly chose the easy problems, not the hard problems in the control group. And that’s interesting, because when I was a teacher, I spent all my time coming up with really demanding and rigorous learning opportunities. I wanted to have that challenging stand and deliver type curriculum. And yet, many of my students might shy away from that. And in fact, we find nationally many students shy away from that.
What happened in the treatment group when students got the growth mindset? What we found is rather striking increases in the rate at which students said, “Give me the hard problems. I want the ones that are going to teach me something new, even if I might sacrifice the chance to look like the smartest.”And so that is one example of a kind of learning-oriented behavior that just feels more reasonable in a growth mindset. By the way, in the study I just described, we had schools across the country. We randomly selected public high schools across the U.S. and gave them this task. We call it the make a math worksheet task. And we found that pretty much consistently across the country, no matter what group students were from, what schools they’re in, growth mindset made students more willing to choose the hard math problems versus the easy math problems.
Mills: So one of the aspects of your work that’s really interesting, I think, is that the interventions that you’re working with appear to decrease racial, socioeconomic, and other achievement gaps. Can you talk about that? Are growth mindset interventions most effective for students who are more at risk, or do they work for everyone?
Yeager: In the study I just described, we find pretty consistently growth mindset will change as long as students pay attention. It will change their attitudes and their behavior moments later. The interesting part is, what happens if you come back three months, five months, six months, 10 months, 12 months later? Are students’grades higher? Are they taking the harder math courses? If they’re college students, are they still full-time students? What we find in general is that overall students’grades tend to increase and they tend to take harder math classes. But especially the grade effects are more striking for students who previously had lower grades, which in the U.S. are often students who are from families that have fewer socioeconomic resources, or students from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds.
In the college-going studies we find the same kinds of results. So students of color and first-generation college students tend to benefit more in terms of their grades and course taking from the growth mindset compared to students from more advantaged backgrounds. The scientific puzzle though is, well, do the advantage students not need the mindset? Are they not listening to it, or is something else going on? What we think is that students from groups that are negatively stereotyped in our society have to confront a lot of fixed-mindset messaging. In fact, the idea that some groups are just inherently smarter than others is an explicit part of our country’s history with segregation. In fact, that’s a key part of the ideology that justified segregation prior to Brown v. Board.
And so in many ways, what a growth mindset can do is allow a student to have a little bit of a reprieve from very prominent and prevalent ideas that to this day persist about members of minority groups. And it may allow them to see themselves in this, given the educational setting, as having the potential to grow and develop. So that’s why we think that growth mindset is a promising way to try to address some of the persistent racial or socioeconomic inequalities. But we don’t think it’s the only way, and we certainly don’t think it’s a silver bullet.
Mills: Have you only administered these interventions with respect to mathematics, or are you doing it in other subjects as well?
Yeager: We often do the interventions completely separate from content areas. So you might get it in health class, or PE class, or geology class. There’s nothing about the intervention that needs to be delivered in a content area, but we often find effects in the most rigorous and anxiety-inducing classes. Because those are the classes where students are most at risk for experiencing fixed mindset cultures. So there’s another point that’s a little, not as interesting, which is simply that there’s grade inflation in English and history in U.S. public high schools. And almost everyone gets an A already. So even if the treatment was working, it’s harder to find out if it’s working because the control group is already getting straight As and the treatment group can’t do any better.
Mills: The measurement in math class is much more precise.
Yeager: Yeah, the GPA in math is like 2.3 and in English it’s like 3.0 on a four point scale.
Mills: I understand there was some criticism in some corners that the paper that you published in Nature didn’t include the intervention that your colleagues administered to students. Why would you have left it out? And how does somebody get a copy if they want to use this technique?
Yeager: Yeah, I never understood that. A third of the intervention is in the online supplement, so people can see all the important parts. The whole thing is available through our population research center, and that’s listed in the article. So I never understood the motivations of people who wanted to claim that, and it’s kind of a weird myth that persists. The truth is that, if you make it freely available then private companies will take it and sell it and say, “Nature already showed this works.”And then there’ll be lots of deceptive marketing around a really promising idea, and claims being made about what we’re doing. And so anyone who wants to do research with it can access it. We just don’t allow private companies or people who are going to misuse the materials to use them without requests.
I mean, it’s like saying you read a paper on the COVID vaccine and you can’t download the COVID vaccine, that’s what it’s saying. Because of course the companies who develop the COVID vaccine should then own the intellectual property and people can replicate the results if they’d like. But it doesn’t mean that anyone who reads the paper is entitled to proprietary information. So I just never understood that. But I do think it’s critical at a higher level for people to continue to replicate. And we have, we have lots of independent replications, we’ve shared it. But also to develop new materials and make them better. And I think we welcome any scientific inquiry to improve the materials and to try to understand how to improve people’s lives.
Mills: Well, that makes sense. And I certainly just wanted to raise that because I had heard that that was your response as well. You’re also studying growth mindset in teachers, right? And whether teachers’understanding of mindset makes a difference in their students’outcomes, what are you finding?
Yeager: In our national study done in the U.S., the first pass at which was published in Nature, we looked at school cultures and found that school cultures undermine the treatment effect if they support more fixed mindset behaviors. But school cultures enhance the treatment effect if they support more growth mindset behaviors. So if you go back to that worksheet task I mentioned where students can choose the easy or the hard problems, there are some schools where in the control group, students are already saying, “Yes, give me more hard math problems.”And some schools where they’re saying, “No, I want the easy problems.”And you can, reading between the lines, it’s as though kids might be made fun of for raising their hand and saying, “Yes, math teacher, please give me harder math problems.”
And before we did the study, we didn’t know in which kind of school the treatment would work better or worse. So would it work better in the schools that have supportive peer norms, because the peers need to reinforce the short mindset message? Or would it work better in the schools that have unsupportive norms, because that’s where you need it the most?
And we kind of had a debate between the psychologists and the sociologists on our team. Sociologists, as you know, think about the context. They want to think about social structures and focus less on the individual. Psychologists, our bias is that we kind of put too much on the minds of the individual and underemphasize the importance of organizations. And what did we find? It turns out that sociologists were right. The sociologists predicted that the supportive norms would be necessary to sustain the mindset intervention. And that’s what the data showed.
And the next study, the next follow-up paper that hopefully will come out soon, we zoomed in on the classroom. We surveyed teachers and asked them about their mindsets. And what we found is that when teachers reported more of a growth mindset, that’s where you got bigger treatment effects. When teachers reported more of a fixed mindset, you got nothing. In both kinds of classrooms you can change the mindset, you can change the behavior, but you don’t change the grades at the end of the year, unless the teacher has a supportive growth mindset.
So what are we doing now? Well, instead of just saying, “Well, it looks like you can’t give the treatment unless in a supportive context,”which would be kind of a disappointing conclusion if you want to use the treatment to address problems with motivation, we’re instead saying, “How can we begin to change classroom culture? How can we change the peer culture and the teacher beliefs, so that in places where previously the treatment would not have worked, now the treatment could work?”
And it turns out that’s a very hard question to answer. Because now we’re thinking of changing adults in their professional roles. And as everyone knows, it’s hard to change adults, especially in our professional settings. Adults are nested within bosses who have certain expectations. Teachers for instance, are beholden to the school boards that they’re in. They have many demands on their time. They’re constantly being asked to do whatever the latest policy fad is. And so rather than kind of throw up our hands and say, “We’re just going to have to take it that the treatment doesn’t work in certain settings,”we’re trying to mobilize scientists and practitioners to look at the problem of teacher behavior change and the cultures they create as the next great scientific challenge. And I think it’s essential that we do it if we’re going to meet the demands of overcoming the current crisis we’re in with respect to education and student engagement.
Mills: What, if any, work is happening about getting this concept into curriculum for people who are studying to become teachers?
Yeager: I’ve often thought that growth mindset should be a part of teacher education. And it is in many ways. However, researchers, we kind of need to get our act together and provide more direct evidence for teachers who want to use growth mindset on a daily basis as a part of their routines and rituals. And we haven’t yet provided the guidance that teachers need, I think, to implement these ideas with fidelity and with high impact. We have far more confidence in the student mindset interventions because of the level of testing and evaluation. But on the teacher side, what are the practices they need to have? Is it enough to put up a poster on the wall to say, “Have a growth mindset”? Or does something deeper need to happen? So I think schools of education are a beautiful means for using this evidence. And I think there’s a hunger for it because of the growing attention to social and emotional learning. But the research really needs to be accelerated and we need to start learning from expert practitioners so that we can do it more quickly.
Mills: So I mentioned in my introduction that you often focus on helping students at times of transition, like when they’re starting high school or college. What role does timing play in these interventions?
Yeager: I’m a developmental psychologist primarily, and I’m informed in part by classic models of the importance of a life transition. Glen Elder is a classic sociologist who developed these ideas, along with my mentor, Rob Crosnoe. And what we think that transitions do is they create an openness to new ways of thinking and new habits. So an example of a transition is transition from middle school to high school or high school to college. But other transitions are from not having children to having children. From being in the military, back into civilian life or vice versa. From going from civilian into military life.
And each of these examples and in many others, what you see is that you’re in a new role that you don’t quite know how to master. And you see lots of ambiguity. You see supervisors who are giving you feedback. Does this mean they believe in me or that they’re going to kick me out? You may have a hard time finding the right people to rely on, to turn to, right? You may not know if the abilities you have now are ever going to be up to the level that they need to be to succeed in this new setting. So there’s a lot of discomfort, a lot of questioning, a lot of ambiguity. In those moments we think that seemingly small differences in your overall belief system can lead to self-reinforcing cycles and positive or negative directions.
Let’s take the example of a ninth grader in the fixed mindset in this transition to high school math, right? High school math should be harder than your middle school math if it’s doing its job. It’s supposed to be preparing you for the next level, right? But a student with a fixed mindset may interpret that as, “Wow, this class is harder than what I could do. I should drop maybe to the lower level class. Or I should be ashamed of how much I don’t know and I should keep that lack of knowledge a secret. I shouldn’t study in groups. I shouldn’t raise my hand” and so on.
And so the interpretation of the difficulty leads to early stage behaviors that then cause a student to underperform on the next quiz or test. Now they’ve underperformed on the quiz or test they may say, “Wow, I guess I was right. I’m not that smart at this.”And that’s this—so the worry becomes reluctance to behave in a prolearning way, which becomes low performance, which becomes evidence that feeds into more worry, right? That’s what Jeff Cohen calls a recursive process.
So in a growth mindset though a small shift in a belief about the meaning of difficulty could lead a student to interpret that same early challenge at the beginning of ninth grade, as a normal part of meeting ambitious learning goals. “I chose a hard math class because I believe in myself and I want to go far. This math, of course it’s hard, this is a challenging course. And I see many other students who are also struggling. If I continue doing the work and ask them for help, then I’m going to get better at this and then I’ll be ready for the next challenge and I’ll feel confused then, right?”
Student may then go to the teacher and say, “I’m struggling on this one thing. Can you help me explain it?”Or to peers, “You guys understand this. Can you tell me how you got it?”The student with a growth mindset may not fear the same kind of shame, may not have the same kind of worries. And then the small behaviors that lead to the better performance, that then becomes positive evidence and leads to less worry about ability. And that’s what Geoff Cohen calls a positive recursive process.
So it’s not like we think growth mindset doesn’t matter at other times, but we think that when there’s so much up in the air in a life transition, that’s the time where a small difference in beliefs or like a Bayesian base rate can lead to a just slightly different probability of either a prolearning or an antilearning behavior that over time could become self-reinforcing.
Mills: There’s another theory in psychology that’s gotten a lot of attention recently, Angela Duckworth’s concept of grit. And I’m just wondering, what’s the difference between growth mindset and grit? Are they related?
Yeager: Well, they’re correlated—I mean, almost every good academic behavior is correlated with almost every other good academic behavior. You know, they are different concepts. Angela would argue, and I think it’s probably true, that growth mindset is one possible antecedent of grit. And one way to promote gritty persistence in the face of failure is to help people believe that that failure is not debilitating, but instead is a means through which you can become stronger.
I think the differences between the two concepts mainly stem from the different traditions that they come from. Grit is kind of coming from a personality individual differences perspective. What explains variation in people’s performance over time, especially among people who are already positively selected to be good at a thing. So among West Point Cadets, what distinguishes West Point Cadets who continue versus not. Among elite spelling bee people. What distinguishes people who win the spelling bee versus coming 20th, right? And grit I think really plays a role in those types of settings.
Mindset is coming out of a social cognitive tradition. And what I mean by that is, it’s more about the ways that we interpret the world, the meaning we make out of it, more likely to be socialized by the things we overhear our parents say, that we see on TV, about ability and so on. And those different traditions are not superficial because they actually lead to different predictions about how to promote the different constructs. So I would say that grit and growth mindset are very friendly cousins, and they predict different things and they work in different ways, but they get together for family reunions all the time.
Mills: I like that image. You talk about, in your research you had this huge cohort of students from across the country. Are you looking to implement the same kind of testing with students in other countries? I’m just wondering, because as you talk about American students wanting to take the easy way out, might it be that students in other cultures would behave differently just from the get-go? Are you looking at that?
Yeager: Yeah, I’m really glad you raised that, because just last week, the OECD-
Mills: Oh, you’re going to have to explain that OECD.
Yeager: Yeah, OECD is an international economic development organization. So there are 78 or so nations in the world that are considered OECD nations. And OECD provides guidance on things like healthcare and education. But one of the important things they do is they administer an international test called the PISA, P-I-S-A. And in 2008 they had 600,000 students from around the world. And in each nation that they collected data from, they had about four to 6,000 students that were randomly selected from the population. So we’re talking random samples from all developing countries in the world. And those students in that test completed a comprehensive assessment of reading and math skills, but they also completed a very long survey. And on that survey was some growth mindset measures, and also measures where students rated the mindset supportiveness of their teachers. So what did the PISA find in their report?
Well, first they find that growth mindset predicts achievement around the world. In something like 72 out of 77 nations growth mindset positively predicts higher test scores among 15-year-olds, which is what we focused on often in our research. So that’s really interesting. Well, what about the countries where growth mindset does not predict test scores? Interestingly, they’re almost all East Asian countries. So three of them are regions of China and it’s like, “Okay, that’s interesting.”Well, does growth mindset not matter in East Asian cultures? That doesn’t seem right, because certainly the fixed mindset fear that you’re not smart could be stressful for anyone.
But it turns out that the PISA has discovered a secret to the puzzle. As it happens, that in countries where mindset does not predict test scores, mindset predicts well-being the best. So a fear of failure, a fear of letting people down, a worry that you’ll be revealed as inadequate. A lot of these mental health stress and well-being measures show the strongest correlations with growth mindset in the countries where the measure of growth mindset does not predict achievement. So let’s answer the puzzle. Well, in a lot of East Asian countries, students are already doing 40 hours of schoolwork a week outside of their regular school time. So if you have a growth mindset, you can’t really do much more math homework and science homework.
Mills: It’s amazing.
Yeager: But if you have a fixed mindset, you could definitely worry that you’re failing your family and your community if you’re not seeming smart. And so I think what it really invites us to do is to look for more puzzles like that internationally and say, “How do we go from the old world of saying, ‘Is growth mindset real or not? Does it predict things or not?’into the new world of saying, ‘Where does it not predict outcomes? How might it predict other outcomes, and what are the cultural factors at play?’”So I think the future is really going to be learning from those differences across cultures and that heterogeneity and the PISA result, which I encourage everyone to look at the report, is going to be a very fascinating launching point for that new research.
Mills: Well, this has been really interesting, Dr. Yeager, I appreciate your joining us today and talking to us about your research and wish you luck in your future endeavors.
Yeager: Thank you very much.
Mills: You can read more about Dr. Yeager’s work in the April/May issue of APA’s magazine Monitor on Psychology. Just go to www.apa.org/monitor. And you can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www.speakingofpsychology.org, or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. That’s speakingofpsychology, all one word, @apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
