Growth Mindset

The idea of having a "growth mindset" is the latest rage in education.  The theory states that we should teach students that they can learn and grow, not that their intelligence is fixed.

It's OK as far as it goes--we want children to try and stretch and strive--but of course we in education warp and twist and contort the idea until no shred of reality is left.  We do each have intellectual limits, but my guess is too many people stop before reaching those limits because growing and learning require a lot of effort and time, two quantities that can be spent on more "fun" activities.

I like learning, but that's just me.  That's why I took 5 years of math classes to get my master's degree rather than a 1 year hoop-jump of education classes.

Here's a view about growth mindset that sounds reasonable to me:

In a series of research meta-analyses in 2018, Brooke Macnamara, an associate professor in cognitive psychology at Case Western University, and colleagues found that the average effect size for growth mindset interventions tends to be small and focused mainly on low-performing or low-income students.

While Yeager’s intervention is free to schools, “there are always opportunity costs,” Macnamara said. “What you don’t want is time spent on a growth mindset intervention that doesn’t benefit most students or produces very small effects, and give up the opportunity to, say, learn the new math technique or a new topic in science.”

Yeager and his colleagues found the growth mindset intervention was associated with .10 of a point improvement on a four-point GPA scale. Macnamara suggested that changing a student’s GPA from 2.0 to 2.1 is “not really changing a whole lot. ... Something that actually changes [students’] GPA in a practical way—that college admissions can notice the difference—I think would be important.”