Published in Nature, a national study released this week which revealed that growth mindset intervention boosts academic success resulting in having higher grades.
The study involved about twelve thousand and five hundred (12,500) ninth (9th) graders for the evaluation. These freshman students showed that by having two (2) sessions with a twenty-five (25) minutes duration in each online task can promote academic output and eagerness to learn during in advance lessons.
David Yeager, the lead of the said study and associate professor from the University of Texas, stated that the reason for choosing ninth (9th) graders was because “it’s a transitional year for young people.” During this transition, the students tend to lose in touch with friends and teachers due to a sudden change of lifestyle in school which Yeager put it as “a time when the standards are rising.”
He added that this could be an ideal time to “set them on a better path” when he further explained:
So we thought that a mindset that could instill optimism at that key juncture might be a welcome change for people and set them on a better path.
Developing a stronger growth mindset
From seventy-six (76) public high schools, the researchers found that the growth mindset of underperforming students became stronger after participating in the study. The perception of having the skills as “fixed” and couldn’t be altered was flipped.
As a result, these students have increased their average grade points in regards to their academic classes such as math and science by the end of the freshman year.
The teaching approach of inducing growth mindset has attracted attention to educators. Over the last ten (10) years, it propels education advocates to rethink on how to elevate students’ academic proficiency and learning.
However, doubt still resurfaces particularly in regards to the personalized program, such has similar results to Yeager’s study.
The growth mindset intervention shows that only point one (0.1) of the grade point average (GPA) scale was improved. An associate professor at Case Western University who studies cognitive psychology, Brooke Macnamara, said that the value proved to produce “very small effects” and that the growth mindset intervention is inclined to focus “mainly on low-performing or low-income students.”
This means that high-performing students who participated in the mindset intervention have no grade improvement at all. Nevertheless, the intervention’s merit lies in the low-cost execution with a proven positive result to underperformed students.
