Switch - Chip Heath [68]
Which, of course, prompts an obvious question: Can people with a fixed mindset learn to adopt a growth mindset?
9.
In 2007, Dweck and two colleagues, Kali Trzesniewsi of Stanford and Lisa Blackwell of Columbia, decided to run an experiment on junior-high-school students: If they trained the students on the growth mindset, would the kids get better at math?
Junior high is, as you know, a tough transition time for kids. Most people have decidedly mixed memories of junior high, and 40 percent of people actually rank adolescence as the worst time in their lives. (Presumably the other 60 percent didn’t have acne.) Just as puberty begins to kick in, students move to new schools with harder work and a new crop of teachers who don’t give them the warm individual attention they got used to in elementary school. Junior high is a turning point for fixed mindset kids: Dweck found that in elementary school, fixed-mindset students do about as well as growth-mindset students but in junior high suffer an immediate drop in grades and then continue to slide in the next few years.
The students in Dweck’s study often came up with fixed-mindset explanations for their decline: “I am the stupidest.” “I suck in math.” Notice how they’re talking about their abilities as permanent traits, as if they were saying, “My eyes are brown.” (Other students tended to place the blame elsewhere, saying things like “I didn’t do well because the teacher is on crack” or “My math teacher is a fat male slut.”)
Dweck and her colleagues set up a study for seventh-grade math students in a school where 79 percent of students were eligible for the federal free lunch program—exactly the kind of low socioeconomic environment in which students are at risk for starting a pattern of academic failure. The control group was taught generic study skills, and the experimental group was taught the growth mindset.
The growth-mindset students were taught that the brain is like a muscle that can be developed with exercise—that with work, they could get smarter. After all, Dweck told them, “nobody laughs at babies and says how dumb they are because they can’t talk.”
Classroom mentors asked the students to think about skills they already had learned—Remember when you first stepped onto a skateboard or played Guitar Hero?—and to recall how practice had been the key to mastering those skills. Students were reminded that “Everything is hard before it is easy,” and that they should never give up because they didn’t master something immediately. In total, the students in the growth-mindset group received two hours of “brain is like a muscle” training over eight weeks. And the results? Astonishing.
Students in the control group who were taught generic study skills started out their seventh-grade year with math grades at about a C+ level. Over the course of the year, their grades slipped to a C and then toward C–. The “brain is like a muscle” training, however, stopped this slide and reversed it. The students who received it significantly outperformed their peers.
Some students made dramatic transformations. In Mindset, Dweck reported, “One day, we were introducing the growth mindset to a new group of students. All at once Jimmy—the most hard-core, turned-off, low-effort kid in the group—looked up with tears in his eyes and said, ‘You mean I don’t have to be dumb?’ From that day on, he worked. He started staying up late to do his homework, which he never used to bother with at all. He started handing in assignments early so he could get feedback and revise them. These kids now believe that working hard was not something