When a child solves a math problem well, we often say, “Wow, you're so smart!” The praised child is delighted, but the next time they meet a hard problem, they may simply give up. That is because they fear that if they can't solve it, they will no longer be a smart kid.
There is a concept built on the idea that the beliefs we hold about ability change the way we approach learning. It is called the ‘Growth Mindset’. Put simply, a growth mindset is the attitude of believing that ‘intelligence and talent can grow through effort, good strategies and help from those around us’.
In this article, we will look in turn at how a growth mindset differs from a fixed mindset, the praise experiment that supported it, how to nurture it in the classroom, and finally common misconceptions and the limits of the research.
How Beliefs About Ability Change Learning
Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset
The growth mindset is a concept refined by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University in the United States, over decades of research on student motivation. Dweck brought the idea to a wide audience in 2006 with her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. She explains it by dividing the ways people view the source of ability into two ends.
- Fixed Mindset: The belief that intelligence and talent are innate and do not change much. As a result, failure is taken as proof of lacking ability, and one wants to avoid difficult tasks.
- Growth Mindset: The belief that ability is developed through learning and practice. As a result, failure and feedback are seen as opportunities to learn more, and the strength to persevere through challenges grows.
The important point is that the two mindsets are not types neatly divided like personality traits, but a single continuum. Dweck herself said that everyone has a mixture of both mindsets, and that no one has a growth mindset about everything all the time.
How a Single Word of Praise Changed Children's Choices
The signature experiment of growth mindset research is a 1998 study on praise conducted by Claudia Mueller and Dweck with fifth-grade students in the United States. After having the children solve problems, the researchers varied the way they praised them.
(1) Intelligence praise
They praised the children for being smart, with words like “You did well on these problems, you must be really smart.”
(2) Effort praise
They praised the process of trying hard, with words like “You did well on these problems, you must have worked really hard.”
(3) Control group
They only said the result was good and gave no reason.
Next, the children were deliberately given difficult problems. After failing, the children who had received intelligence praise showed a marked drop in their desire to keep working on problems and in their enjoyment, and their performance also fell. Even more striking was the stage in which they reported their own scores to another fifth grader they had never met. In the intelligence praise group, 38% inflated their scores, compared with only 13% in the effort praise group and 14% in the control group. Being praised as smart had, in effect, led the children to measure their own worth by results.
How to Nurture a Growth Mindset in the Classroom
Dweck and her fellow researchers stress that a growth mindset grows from a consistent classroom culture rather than a single remark. Here are some approaches teachers and parents can put into practice.
- Process Praise: Instead of innate brains, specifically praise the effort, strategies, choices and persistence the student used.
- The Power of Yet: When a child says “I can't do it,” add “not yet” to remind them that ability can change.
- Teaching Neuroplasticity: Explain that every time we learn something difficult, new connections form in the brain and grow stronger.
- Learning from Mistakes: Rather than hiding wrong answers, look together at where the thinking got stuck.
Approaches like these have sometimes shown effects even as brief interventions. In a study by David Yeager and colleagues published in the international journal Nature in 2019, about 12,000 ninth-grade students at 65 public high schools in the United States took two online sessions, each lasting less than an hour. As a result, students whose grades were in the lower half of their school saw their grade point averages in core subjects rise slightly, and more students chose challenging math courses.
Common Misconceptions and Limits of the Research
The growth mindset spread quickly through schools and businesses, but it has also been misused just as often.
False Growth Mindset
Dweck warned against praising children with nothing but “You worked hard” regardless of the outcome. Praising effort alone without helping them change methods that aren't working is merely consolation. The heart of a growth mindset is not effort itself, but actually improving by combining effort with new strategies and help from others.
Smaller Effects Than Expected
Analyses that pooled many studies found that the average effect of mindset interventions was small, and a large-scale 2019 trial by the Education Endowment Foundation in the UK found no clear improvement in reading and math scores. In the study by Yeager and colleagues as well, the effects held up better in schools where peers encouraged taking on challenges. In the end, this means one student's belief alone is not enough; an environment where failing is okay has to come with it.
A growth mindset is not a magic cure, but it changes the starting point of learning by helping us see failure as part of the process rather than the end. The small habit of asking a child “How did you solve it?” instead of saying “You're so smart” is what drives that change.
Trusting the word “yet” and looking for the next approach: that is the first step in education toward becoming a lifelong learner.
