How Mindset Impacts Academic Achievement
Carol Dweck’s “Mindset” work is well known across the education landscape. It is championed by everyone who wants to encourage “trying”, and is built on an impressive body of research. Unfortunately, it’s also controversial. It seems that it is hard to replicate. Supportive evidence from researchers other than Dweck is thin on the ground.
Enter Brooke Macnamara and Alexander Burgoyne. In a devastating blow to mindset research, they took on the following:
- A review of empirical studies’ adherence to a set of best practices essential for drawing causal conclusions and
- Conducting three meta-analyses.
What happened? They examined 63 studies with 97,672 total participants. And they found (from the abstract) “major shortcomings in study design, analysis, and reporting, and suggestions of researcher and publication bias: Authors with a financial incentive to report positive findings published significantly larger effects than authors without this incentive.”
Ouch.
Moreover, across all studies, they observed very small overall effects of mindset interventions, which were not statistically significant. When examining only studies demonstrating the intervention influenced students’ mindsets as intended, the effect was nonsignificant. And when examining the highest-quality evidence (6 studies, N = 13,571), the effect was nonsignificant.
The short version: They, consistent with other researchers who have also done similar meta-analyses, conclude that the apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias.
What does this mean? Is it all bunk?
Evidence doesn’t support mindset interventions. This doesn’t mean it is not useful. Henry Ford’s somewhat less academic version still rings true: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re probably right.”
It doesn’t have to be right to be useful.
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