However, attributing children’s good performance to intelligence may have an undesired impact on children’s overall achievement.

– Praise for Intelligence can Undermine Children’s Motivation and Performance

We found no evidence for growth mindset promoting higher grades or higher cognitive ability success.

– You Can’t Change Your Basic Ability, but You Work at Things, and That’s How we Get Hard Things Done: Testing the Role of Growth Mindset to Setbacks, Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability

It has been suggested that a growth mindset should be preferred over a fixed mindset. A growth mindset suggests any goal can be achieved with hard work and persistence. A fixed mindset sets a ceiling on achievement by suggesting how far one goes is determined by how much innate ability one possesses. Two researchers have debunked this suggestion.

Researchers Yue Li and Timothy Bates of Edinburgh University found no evidence that a growth mindset is more beneficial than a fixed mindset to recover from setbacks, to perform better in exams and to increase general intelligence. Their findings have been published in a paper for the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

These findings are noteworthy because it may mean that what we have been believing about having the right mindset for over twenty years is not correct. Much of what we do as educators and during moments of self-talk when facing challenges is based on what is now conventional wisdom – our attitude determines our altitude.

This aphorism was based on Mueller and Dweck’s 1998 seminal work on the effects of praising children for effort rather than ability. For what was likely to be the first time in 21 years, Li and Bates in 2019, replicated the same experiments of Mueller and Dweck but failed to find the positive effects of praising for effort claimed by Mueller and Dweck.

Before we take a closer look at the 2019 findings, it is important to state what Li and Bates did not suggest. They did not suggest that hard work is of no value. They did not suggest that ability is fixed and not amenable to development. They did not suggest that how ‘intelligent’ one is, determines how far they get in life, which is itself a contestable concept. They did not suggest that some of us are inherently more capable than the rest of us and accordingly deserve better (whatever that means).

Their findings pertained strictly to a student’s mindset about achievement and its relationship with intelligence or in other words whether it matters if a student believes only the naturally intelligent can achieve high performance. In essence, their findings seem to imply what a student believes about intelligence is not important.

Li and Bates conducted a series of tests (replicating Mueller and Dweck, 1998) with 624 children aged 9-13 from primary schools in Heilongjiang Province, China. The general format of these tests was as follows:

– Students were asked to try 10 relatively easy test questions.
– They were all told they did better than they actually did.
– Some of them were praised for effort, “You must have worked really hard at these problems!”
– Some of them were praised for innate ability, “You must be smart at these problems!”
– Students were then given a more difficult set of questions to complete and were told they performed poorly regardless of how
they actually performed. (This was to create a sense of failure in the students.)
– They were then asked to fill up a questionnaire to assess if they preferred a learning or a performance goal. For instance,
students who said they preferred, “problems that I’m pretty good at, so that I can show I’m smart,” preferred performance goals
which is to prioritise a feeling of competence. Students who said they preferred, “problems that I’ll learn a lot from, even if
I won’t look so smart”” preferred learning goals which is to prioritise learning.
– They were also asked to answer questionnaires to measure, task persistence, task-enjoyment and self-rated performance.
(The questionnaires measured their mindset)

– The children were then asked why they did poorly in the second test. Some said, “I didn’t work hard enough” and others said,
“I’m not good enough at the problems”.
– Students were then given a third set of difficult questions.
– Their results were measured and contextualised according to their mindset.

Li and Bates did find that students with a growth mindset “showed significantly higher postfailure performance compared to children in the fixed mindset condition”.

However, they were not convinced because in their view, the students who performed better after failing once, could have done so not because of what they believed about intelligence but because they believed in the value of hard work or were otherwise motivated for some other reason.

So, they tweaked the experiment to isolate the effects of mindsets if any. The modifications included adding a control group which was made to believe, “You can learn new things, but you can’t really change your basic intelligence.” They also added a fourth set of very difficult questions for the students to attempt. They did this because it was previously suggested that a growth mindset would lead to higher performance in very challenging situations. In the tweaked experiment condition, they made the following findings:

– A growth mindset did not lead to better performance after failure, on moderately difficult questions.
– A growth mindset did not lead to better performance after failure, on very difficult questions.
– No relationship was found between a growth mindset and performance on moderately difficult questions after having failed once.
– Students who had a growth mindset performed worse on very difficult questions after having failed once.

To be sure, they repeated this version of the experiment again. Their findings did not differ materially.

They then looked at the English, Chinese and Mathematics scores of the students before and after they went through the experiment. They also measured the students’ general cognitive ability before and after the experiment. Part of the experiment comprised teaching some students that intelligence cannot be changed and others that intelligence can be changed with effort. They wanted to know if students who believed intelligence could be changed would improve cognitive ability or show better performance in their school tests, over time. They found “no evidence for growth mindset promoting higher grades or higher cognitive ability scores”.

This led Li and Bates to suggest conclusively that what students believe about intelligence is not important. This seems to throw into question the utility of future orientations and self occupation more than anything else. This is in relation to challenging situations.

People, especially in Asian contexts used to place (and perhaps still do) a premium on innate intelligence and giftedness. This made some despair. To counter the despair, the term growth mindset became popular, after Mueller and Dweck strongly recommended praising effort rather than ability. However, even this may not be what students can hold on to in difficult situations.

Focusing on intelligence whether it can be changed or whether it is a fixed and stable quality is to focus on what can be. Focusing on what can be takes away attention and energy from the present moment.

When a student faces a setback or a challenging situation, the most helpful thought may not be whether he can or cannot make it to the destination safely because he is x, y and z. In fact, any thought of “I” may be unhelpful and even detrimental. This extends to thoughts such as “I can improve” or “I can make it if I work hard”.

In such situations, the best thing he can do is to forget himself and become one with the challenge, one step at a time.

The Brain Dojo