Questioning Mind-Set Theory

Earlier this month, the following article was published in Psychological Science.

If you follow education news or punditry, you’ve likely come across mind-set theory, first associated with Carol Dweck, and now taking on a life of its own. Is it yet another fad? Or does it have legs?

First, a quick intro to mind-set theory. I will quote the definitions used in the article. “People who hold growth mind-sets (i.e., incremental theorists) believe that attributes are malleable, whereas those who hold fixed mind-sets (i.e., entity theorists) believe that attributes are unchangeable.” They quote a Dweck paper exhorting the importance of funding more research on mind-set theory as it impacts the education of all our children: “…students with growth mindsets seek to learn and develop their abilities, and thus pursue challenges, value effort, and are resilient to setbacks; in contrast, students with fixed mindsets avoid challenges (which could reveal ‘permanent’ deficiencies), dislike effort (which they think signals low ability), and give up more easily when facing setbacks”.

Wow! The student with the growth mind-set sounds like the ideal student all of us would like to have in class. If only we had classes full of growth mind-set students! We don’t want any of those lazy students who don’t want to be challenged and give up easily, thank you very much. What do I see in my classes? Bits of both. No truly ideal students. No truly lazy ones. That’s not surprising. A lot of things can affect my own motivation to learn and persevere, including how much sleep I had the previous night, whether I’ve had caffeine, whether I’ve just had a nice uplifting conversation or a trying painful one, whether I’ve recently heard good news or bad news, and maybe how many clouds are in the sky.

But to sell ideas, or in this case to test them, you need to encapsulate them into pithy statements. It’s easier if they are idealized statements that sound like polar extremes. Thus, the authors formulate six statements to test. (They draw examples from Dweck and co-workers to support their formulated statements.)

·      People with growth mind-sets hold Learning goals

·      People with fixed mind-sets hold Performance goals

·      People with growth mind-sets persist to overcome challenge

·      People with fixed mind-sets believe that talent alone – without effort – creates success

·      People with growth mind-sets are more resilient following failure

·      People with fixed mind-sets hold performance-avoiding goals

You’ve seen the article’s abstract, so the results are not surprising. The authors find scant correlation for any of these statements. I’m not surprised. Let’s look at the methodology: N = 438 undergraduates answering a bunch of Likert-scale questionnaires (Qs). To measure mind-set, students took Dweck’s eight-question Implicit Theories of Intelligence Q. Then there’s a sixteen-question Goal Orientation Q, a Response to Challenge Q, and one to measure “belief in talent versus effort” which simply asks the students to agree-disagree with three statements: “talent alone – without effort – creates success”, its opposite, and a “both are needed” version. I bet almost all my students would identify with the “both are needed” version over the others. (My reading of their data suggests I’m right.)

The challenge of designing questionnaires to support or debunk mind-set theory is fraught with complications. That’s why there will be no clear winner in this debate, at least for a while. Believers in mind-set theory will continue to champion it; critics will continue to criticize it. There’s no good way to measure implicitly any of these constructs – they’re complex and multifaceted even if rendered in seemingly simple statements. I can’t look into your brain to know how you think about these things. Constructs are just, well, constructs. You can come up with different ones; the authors cite three others (self-efficacy, need for achievement, openness to experience) that they think show better correlation with the “data” than mind-set theory.

There are two tests that I found interesting in the paper. To measure cognitive ability, the study took composite averages of student performance on the Cattell Culture Fair Test 4 and a Letter Set test. These are pattern recognition tests, similar to what you might see on an IQ test. Then, they had the students take challenging items in Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices Challenge Test (also pattern recognition), told them their scores, and then gave them some less-challenging items and seeing how they did after the initial feedback. I thought this was a clever design. Interestingly, the students with more of a growth mind-set, did worse on the second set of Raven’s Test, although the effect size was still small.

What did I learn from all this? I’d like my students to exhibit the qualities associated with the growth mind-set as quoted above, but I’m certainly not going to classify them as moving from fixed mind-set to growth mind-set; I don’t think these labels are helpful. (I still hear students making unhelpful claims about “learning styles”.) Although I will continue to remind students that they have the capacity to learn new things, encourage them to do so, and remind them that their professors are there to help them. Students have a jumble of motivations when they come to college; my small piece of the pie is to help them appreciate (and perhaps even enjoy) learning chemistry.