âPraising childrenâs intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.â â Carol S. Dweck
Nowhere are the effects of mindsets more consequentialâor more observableâthan in education. Schools are where most of us first encounter the labels of âsmartâ and ânot smart,â where the fixed mindset often takes hold, and where the right or wrong messages from adults can set children on trajectories that last a lifetime. This chapter brings Dweckâs research to its most practical and urgent ground: how do mindsets affect learning, and what can parents, teachers, and society do about it?
Dweck and her colleague Claudia Mueller conducted what became one of the most influential studies in educational psychology. They took fifth-grade students and had them complete a set of moderately difficult puzzles. After the first round, they praised all studentsâbut with a twist. Some students were told, âWow, you got eight right. Thatâs a really good score. You must be smart at this.â Others were told, âWow, you got eight right. Thatâs a really good score. You must have worked really hard.â
The same performance, praised in two entirely different ways. Then the researchers gave students a choice of follow-up tasks: they could do a harder set of problems (which theyâd learn from) or an easier set (which they could definitely do well on). Nearly 90% of the students praised for effort chose the harder set. The majority of students praised for intelligence chose the easier set.
After another round of (deliberately harder) problems where all students struggled, the differences were even more dramatic:
A single dose of praiseââyouâre smartâ versus âyou worked hardââhad created measurable differences in motivation, persistence, and performance.
When we tell children they are smart, we areâwithout intending toâimplying that intelligence is a fixed quality they happen to possess. This creates several problems:
They feel they must live up to the label. If youâre smart, you should perform well. Struggling or making mistakes becomes a threat to the labelâand therefore to your sense of self.
They become risk-averse. To protect the âsmartâ label, they avoid challenges where they might not look smart. They choose easier tasks, avoid domains where they might fail, and disengage from subjects that require real struggle.
They stop working as hard. If success is supposed to be effortless for smart people, then effort becomes evidence that youâre not as smart as the label claims. Many gifted students develop a troubling pattern: they do well as long as material comes easily, but disengage the moment it requires real work.
They attribute failure to character. When they struggle or fail, they donât think âI need to try harderâ or âI need a better strategyââthey think âIâm not as smart as everyone thought.â
Growth mindset praise focuses on process rather than person:
This kind of praise helps children understand that their achievement came from their effort and approachâthings they can control and continue to develop.
Students with growth mindsets are significantly more resilient than those with fixed mindsets when they encounter academic difficultyâand academic difficulty is inevitable. Every student, at some point in their education, will encounter subjects that donât come easily, teachers who are harder to please, or transitions (like moving from elementary to middle school) that disrupt their previous patterns of success.
Dweck and colleague Lisa Blackwell followed students through the transition to seventh gradeâa period when many studentsâ grades decline as the work gets harder. Students with growth mindsets showed much less of a performance drop. And when they did struggle, they responded by working harder, seeking help, and trying new strategies. Students with fixed mindsets were more likely to disengage, decide they were ânot a math personâ (or whatever subject was difficult), and give up on that domain.
In one of Dweckâs most famous and widely replicated findings, students who received the grade âNot Yetâ for failing a courseârather than a traditional failing gradeâshowed dramatically different responses than students who received âF.â The concept of âNot Yetâ implies that youâre on a learning journey, that your current performance isnât a final verdict but a point on a continuum.
Students given âNot Yetâ grades showed more persistence, greater effort, and better long-term outcomes. The words we use to describe failure matter enormously because they shape what children believe that failure means.
One of the most damaging consequences of fixed mindset thinking in education is the proliferation of fixed identity statementsââIâm just not a math person,â âIâve never been good at science,â âIâm not creative.â These statements close off domains of learning and growth permanently. Once children (or adults) decide they lack a fixed trait in a particular area, they stop trying. And since they stop trying, they never develop the ability they assumed they didnât haveâcreating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Dweck notes that in the United States especially, itâs socially acceptable to claim inability in mathematics in a way that it simply isnât for reading. âI canât readâ carries social stigma. âIâm not a math personâ is treated as a harmless personality quirkâeven worn as a badge of identity. This cultural acceptance of mathematical inability, she argues, has real consequences for how many students disengage from STEM education.
In Japan and China, by contrast, the dominant cultural belief is that mathematical ability is developed through hard work rather than innate talentâand those countries show higher mathematical achievement at the population level.
Researcher Claude Steele identified a phenomenon called stereotype threat: members of groups that are negatively stereotyped in a particular domain (like women in mathematics, or Black students in academic achievement generally) underperform in that domain partly because they are aware of the negative stereotype and anxious about confirming it.
Dweck found that mindset interventions can reduce stereotype threat. When students understand that intelligence is malleable and that struggle is a normal part of learning, the anxiety associated with being a member of a stereotyped group decreases. Theyâre no longer trying to disprove a fixed deficitâtheyâre on a learning journey like everyone else.
In one study, simply teaching students about the growth mindsetâshowing them that the brain, like a muscle, grows stronger with useâled to significant improvements in motivation and performance among students from groups vulnerable to stereotype threat.
Dweck collaborated with educational researchers to develop curriculum that explicitly teaches students about the growth mindset and the neuroscience of learning. Key elements included:
Schools that implemented this curriculum saw significant improvements in student motivation, persistence, and achievementâparticularly among students who had previously been low achievers.
Think about your own educational experiences. Were you praised for being âsmartâ or for working hard? Were there subjects where you decided early on that you âwerenât that kind of personâ? How might those early experiences be shaping your approach to learning today?