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Not "yet" Sold on the Growth Mindset



Hi there!

Today I want to talk to you guys about the growth mindset videos that we watched. Over all I liked the ideas that Mss. Dweck was presenting but the presentation of her research makes me question the scientific backing of her research.

As I watched the first video “The Power of Believing That You Can Improve,” I thought about my own struggles with education and challenging work. Miss. Dweck’s talk kind of hit home for me as someone who has been obsessive about my grades from a very young age and finds challenging course work more and more intimidating as I have moved through my education. I identified emotionally with a lot of the things she was saying, but when she would show photos to represent her research they didn’t seem to be the most convincing. The photo of the head scans is a very simplified all or nothing photo, which is unusual in research. Additionally, the photo that showed a graph of students grades with and without the growth mindset showed only two data points per set which is not enough to be statistically significant. Granted both photos could have been over simplified for use in this presentation, but they do not lend credibility to her research.

Later, in the same video she also talks about three schools in which “growth mindset” classrooms took classes of students from under-performing to over-performing, but she doesn’t explain the study these results came from which makes her later statement attributing the cause and effect to these results questionable. Granted, again it could just be for the purposes of the TED talk that Miss. Dweck didn’t go into more detail, but it does make me questions the scientific nature of what she is saying.

In the third video she says that a study was done of 373 students transitioning into the 7th grade, and then discusses that their test scores differed dramatically over time and the only difference between them was their mindsets. While this is an interesting study a sample size of only 373 students is not enough to definitively prove the effectiveness of her mindset approach.

So, while I think that parents should definitely praise their children for effort and perseverance, I am not sold “yet” on the research.


Photo via Flickr by Alberto G.
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