How can I help my child develop a growth mindset?

Answer 1: Get him or her to read this article You Can Grow Your Intelligence, and talk about together afterwards.


Carol Dweck, pioneer researcher into the Growth Mindset, reported that this article, when presented with some simple lessons in growth-mindset thinking, led to a significant jump in children’s maths scores by the end of the semester. Dweck explains:


Can a growth mindset be taught directly to kids? If it can be taught, will it enhance their motivation and grades? We set out to answer this question by creating a growth mindset workshop (Blackwell, et al., 2007). We took seventh graders and divided them into two groups. Both groups got an eight-session workshop full of great study skills, but the “growth mindset group” also got lessons in the growth mindset — what it was and how to apply it to their schoolwork. Those lessons began with an article called “You Can Grow Your Intelligence: New Research Shows the Brain Can Be Developed Like a Muscle.” Students were mesmerized by this article and its message. They loved the idea that the growth of their brains was in their hands.

This article and the lessons that followed changed the terms of engagement for students. Many students had seen school as a place where they performed and were judged, but now they understood that they had an active role to play in the development of their minds. They got to work, and by the end of the semester the growth-mindset group showed a significant increase in their math grades. The control group — the group that had gotten eight sessions of study skills — showed no improvement and continued to decline. Even though they had learned many useful study skills, they did not have the motivation to put them into practice.

The teachers, who didn’t even know there were two different groups, singled out students in the growth-mindset group as showing clear changes in their motivation. They reported that these students were now far more engaged with their schoolwork and were putting considerably more effort into their classroom learning, homework, and studying.

Click here to read the whole article–it’s an excellent read.