New research was published this month on the growth mindset. A study was performed in India to determine whether it would make an impact to teach children about the growth mindset depending on what sort of rewards they received for achievement. In this study by Chao et al, 1000 students from low socioeconomic status communities were given ten hours of education about the brain - essentially reinforcing the concept of growth mindset - that if you work hard, you can achieve a goal by studying and creating connections in your brain.
The control group learned about the heart in a similar number of sessions. These students, who were all third graders, were further divided into three subgroups based on rewards for good school attendance. The control group received nothing as a reward for attendance. The other two groups were given material rewards but each with a different emphasis. In one of the reward subgroups, the students were told they would receive an award for good attendance, which their teacher would choose for them from a selection of rewards. The final subgroup was told they could choose their own reward if they achieved good attendance and that the attendance would be tracked publicly, to encourage them to be self-motivated to attend.
Student performance was then measured on a standardized test, which the students had taken before. Results of the study revealed that students in the growth mindset training group who were allowed to choose their own reward had their performance augmented - IF they were students with a prior history of high achievement. The low achieving students did not get the same effects.
My take: learning about a growth mindset through a few simple hours of teaching and lesson reinforcement can be encourage students to work harder, but only if they were high achievers at the outset. Since all participants in the study came from low socioeconomic status communities, this implies the students were succeeding despite the odds being stacked against them - perhaps these students already had the trait of resilience? This study may not be generalizable to students from high socioeconomic status backgrounds or who live in high income countries. Chao, M.M., Visaria, S., Dehejia, R., & Mukhopadhyay, A. (2017). Do rewards reinforce the growth mindset? Joint effects of the growth mindset and incentive schemes in a field intervention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(10), 1402-1419.
All material © Alison Schroth Hayward, MD. All rights reserved.
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