A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement

By David S. Yeager, Paul Hanselman, Gregory Walton, Jared S. Murray, Robert Crosnoe, Chandra Muller, Elizabeth Tipton, Barbara Schneider, Chris S. Hulleman, Cintia P. Hinojosa and 15 more. Nature, 2019

1,172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A global priority for the behavioural sciences is to develop cost-effective, scalable interventions that could improve the academic outcomes of adolescents at a population level, but no such interventions have so far been evaluated in a population-generalizable sample. Here we show that a short (less than one hour), online growth mindset intervention—which teaches that intellectual abilities can be developed—improved grades among lower-achieving students and increased overall enrolment to advanced mathematics courses in a nationally representative sample of students in secondary education in the United States. Notably, the study identified school contexts that sustained the effects of the growth mindset intervention: the intervention changed grades when peer norms aligned with the messages of the intervention. Confidence in the conclusions of this study comes from independent data collection and processing, pre-registration of analyses, and corroboration of results by a blinded Bayesian analysis. A US national experiment showed that a short, online, self-administered growth mindset intervention can increase adolescents’ grades and advanced course-taking, and identified the types of school that were poised to benefit the most.

Subfields: Education, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9fb223742fce060785d7f59861d0341d149cb04

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Conformal inference of counterfactuals and individual treatment effects (2020, methodology): “The blue curves correspond to the median and the blue confidence bands are the 5% and 95% quantiles of these estimates across 100 replicates [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] BART (Naive) BART (Inexact) CQR (Naive) CQR (Exact) CQR (Inexact) C ATE Var(ITE | X ) 0.1 0.3 0.5 0.7 0”
The past, present, and future of ego depletion (2019, neutral): “…Wagenmakers et al., 2016), money priming (Lodder, Ong, Grasman, & Wicherts, 2019), candidate genes (Border et al., 2019), and mindset interventions (Glerum, Loyens, Wijnia, & Rikers, 2019; Sisk, Burgoyne, Sun, Butler, & Macnamara, 2018; but see, Yeager et al., 2019) have each suffered similarly.”
L2 grit: Passion and perseverance for second-language learning (2020, background): “What do gritty students think about their intelligence? As noted, the findings of achievement motivation research (see Dweck, 2006; Yeager et al., 2019) favor a growth mindset because it is closely related to perseverance of effort.”
What Can Be Learned from Growth Mindset Controversies? (2020, methodology): “…studies with a total of over 23,000 participants have replicated the meaning system correlations (see Figure 2 and Table 1), two of which were generalizable to entire populations of students, either to the U.S. overall, (Yeager et al., 2019) or to entire parts of Norway (Rege et al., in press).”
Tackling Educational Inequalities with Social Psychology: Identities, Contexts, and Interventions (2020, background): “These are undoubtedly essential developments that progress the science of wise interventions, which are now being empirically tested and validated by large-scale studies (e.g., Borman et al., 2018; Yeager et al., 2019).”
Teacher mindset is associated with development of students' growth mindset (2021, background): “…from primary school to junior high), students' mindsets influence whether students perceive their struggles as evidence of their own incompetence (fixed mindset) or their maturation (growth mindset), and can shape various aspects of their school experience (Rege et al., 2020; Yeager et al., 2019).”
Bayesian Regression Tree Models for Causal Inference: Regularization, Confounding, and Heterogeneous Effects (with Discussion) (2020, positive): “This has been important in applications of the methods outlined in this paper (Yeager et al., 2019).”