Like everyone else, when I first came across Carol Dweck’s theory of growth mindsets I was pretty psyched. There was something so satisfyingly truthy about the way the labels ‘fixed’ and ‘growth’ mindset could explain why children failed or succeeded at school. I wanted to believe that something as simple as telling children their brains are ‘like a muscle’ and showing them a cartoon about synapses forming could make them cleverer. And if praising effort instead of praising intelligence really did make all this happen, then why the hell wouldn’t we? And best of all, the whole edifice was established on rock-solid, credible research and supported by an impeccable evidence base. What wasn’t to like?

The thing is, when something seems to good to be true it often turns out not to be true. I started thinking a bit more critically about the wild claims tossed about by some of the bolder mindset enthusiasts and it didn’t take long for doubts to emerge.

Here’s a list of the increasingly sceptical posts I’ve written over the last year or so:

20 psychological principles for teachers #1 Mindsets May 2015

In this one I challenged some of the APA’s advice to teachers about how to foster growth mindsets in students:

But what if a student is trying as hard as they are able? What if they’ve already tried a range of approaches and still failed? Is telling them their performance can be enhanced with even greater effort likely to be motivational? Having a ‘growth mindset’ does not confer magical powers. Maybe we can all be cleverer, but maybe there’s also a limit?

Why the ‘false growth mindset’ explains so much June 2015

Here I reflected on Carol Dweck’s explanation for why attempts to replicate growth mindset interventions don’t seem to work nearly as well as we might expect:

[Dweck has] identified a phenomenon she calls the ‘false growth mindset’. Because we’ve unanimously agreed that having a fixed mindset is egregious and a growth mindset makes you a better all-round human being, no one wants to fess up to being ‘fixed’. When asked, we tend to say, “Yes of course I have a growth mindset,” because the alternative is to say, “No, I’m afraid I’m a terrible person.” It seems reasonable to suggest teachers are at least as prone to this as anyone; we tend to know more about the perceived benefits of growth mindset than most other people and so there’s a huge social pressure to fall into line. But just saying you have a growth mindset does not (quelle surprise!) mean you actually have one. What you actually have is a false growth mindset.

Is growth mindset pseudoscience? October 2015

The more I thought about the ‘false growth mindset’, the more concerned I became:

The problem with a theory that explains away all the objections is that it becomes unfalsifiable. There are no conditions in which the claim could not be true. For instance, when fossil evidence disproved the widely believed ‘fact’ that the world was created in 4004 BC, Philip Henry Gosse came up with the wonderful argument that God created the fossils to make the world look older than it actually is in order to fox us and make Himself appear even more fabulous and omnipotent… If you adjust the definitions of your theory in order to fit the facts then is the theory science or pseudoscience? If no amount of data or evidence can prove Dweck’s claims false because she can just say, Well, that’s a false growth mindset, not a real one, then what’s the difference between her and Gosse?

The limits of growth mindset May 2016

But surely, I reasoned, with all that empirical support, there must be something worth salvaging. K Anders Ericsson, the expertise expert seems to provide a possible way forward:

Ericsson says that [the] ability to create rich ‘mental representations’ is one of the distinguishing features of the kind of practice which is most likely to lead to improvements: “The relationship between skill and mental representation is a virtuous circle: the more skilled you become, the better your mental representations are, and the better your mental representations are, the more effectively you can practise to hone your skill.” (p. 80)

Hard work and a growth mindset are not enough. In fact, it seems likely that practising more without getting results will probably erode beliefs about self-efficacy. No wonder children learn that they “can’t do maths” or that “French is impossible” if they’re practising in the wrong way. If we believe that the difference between successful and unsuccessful students is their mindset, we could be adding to a potentially toxic cocktail. It’s much more likely that a growth mindset follows from experiencing success. If we get good early results then our self-confidence can become invincible, but if we don’t… Well, only a fool continues to believe anything is possible in the face of increasingly contradictory evidence.

But now it seems that Dweck’s original research is under fire. Yue Li and Timothy Bates have performed faithful replications of her studies but failed to get anything like the same results. Here’s the abstract:

Mindset theory states that children’s ability and school grades depend heavily on whether they believe basic ability is malleable and that praise for intelligence dramatically lowers cognitive performance. Here we test these predictions in 3 studies totalling 624 individually tested 10-12-year-olds. Praise for intelligence failed to harm cognitive performance and children’s mindsets had no relationship to their IQ or school grades. Finally, believing ability to be malleable was not linked to improvement of grades across the year. We find no support for the idea that fixed beliefs about basic ability are harmful, or that implicit theories of intelligence play any significant role in development of cognitive ability, response to challenge, or educational attainment.

Most of the paper is taken up with detailing exactly how they attempted to replicate the studies. The claims they tested are:

  • Praising effort increases a growth mindset view of intelligence whereas praising intelligence promotes a fixed mindset view of intelligence.
  • Mindset predicts students’ grades, cognitive ability, and enhances learning over time.

What they found was that different praise conditions seemed to have no impact on performance:

And further, if mindset does predict attainment then if anything there appears to be a negative correlation between growth mindset interventions:

Figure 2: Growth-mindset intervention is unrelated to performance (left panel) while children’s own growth-mindsets harmed post-challenge performance (right panel). Data from Study 2 challenging item-set.

In summary, Li and Bates say this:

Mindset was predicted to be a major influence determining not only student learning, but also ability and response to negative feedback. Mindsets and mindset-intervention effects on both grades and ability, however, were null, or even reversed from the theorised direction. In study 2, we found one nominally significant effect of mindset on grades, but in the opposite direction to that predicted. Other effects, bar one, were non-significant. This single significant effect of the mindset intervention in study 3 on just the easier material, however, was found even more strongly for our active-control condition, contrary to prediction. This contradicts the idea that beliefs about ability being fixed are harmful. At best, it supports a role for effort predictable from trait personality and motivation theory. [emphasis added]

Sadly, no amount of belief makes something a fact. These studies offer a clear indication that, contrary to what we all hoped and believed, students’ beliefs about their ability are unrelated to their attainment.

In response, Dweck is reported as having said the following:

Not anyone can do a replication… We put so much thought into creating an environment; we spend hours and days on each question, on creating a context in which the phenomenon could plausibly emerge… Replication is very important, but they have to be genuine replications and thoughtful replications done by skilled people. Very few studies will replicate done by an amateur in a willy-nilly way.

If it’s true that replicating her studies takes “hours and days” creating the right context and cannot be done by amateurs “in a willy-nilly way”, then what chance does your average teacher have? Despite the widespread appeal of mindsets theory, this 2016 report suggests that over 80% of teachers who have implemented Dweck’s suggestions have failed to make effective changes in their classrooms. It could be that they’re just doing it wrong and have a ‘false growth mindset’, or it could be that such appealingly simplistic ideas about making profound changes to children’s academic attainment are bollocks?

You decide.