Exercise your learning muscle
IQ isn’t fixed so get those learning muscles exercising this summer.
Did you know that IQ isn’t fixed? That the brain is more like as muscle that gets stronger – builds up more connections – when you learn new things?
Did you know that children and adults can restrict the development of IQ simply by not wanting to make mistakes – because they are not willing to try to learn hard, new things?
Did you know there are two kinds of mindsets – fixed and growth – that decides how well we do at school and in life? That students with growth mindsets get better grades?
Professor Carol Dweck knows the right answers to all of these questions. She is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of motivation. She is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University in the USA and she has held professorships at Columbia and Harvard.
Her extraordinary work on mindset and how it affects the development of potential – for the better or worse - was the topic of a keynote address to a sell-out conference - Unlocking the Door to Learning – I have just had the good fortune to attend in London. Participants came from as far afield as New Zealand, Australia as well as Dubai to hear her.
Her message is something every parent should listen to if they want their children to reach their full potential because children can literally switch off from learning when it gets tough, stay in their comfort zone and never get out it – without anyone ever really knowing.
Professor Dweck says that growth mindset is exemplified by the baby keen to learn hard things like walking and talking – learning from everything whether they work first time or not. And everyone keen to help them on their way – and not thinking they are of restricted potential because they fall over when they first start to walk or muddle up words when they first start to talk.
Some children (and adults) keep that approach to life (or mindset) while others – regardless of their ability – limit what they try to do because they do not want to be seen to fail. The fixed mindset can be exemplified by the bright child whose promise never quite lives up to early potential. Or any child who switches off to some kind of learning.
Her argument is that many of the things parents and teachers and school systems do to help and motivate students make them into non-learners. By praising gifts and talents in children, we are creating a generation that feels it has to be infallible and cannot make mistakes.
Since beginning to publish her work she has received many letters – some of them heartbreaking - from former prodigies who did not fulfill their talents. They had been told so often that they were brilliant they had not understood that brilliance involved hard work and some failure too.
They had never learned how to take on a difficult task. They had avoided them. If they had to work hard for something, they assumed they must be stupid in that area. They didn’t want to risk that. They had fixed mindsets.
But fixed mindsets are not only to be found in the most gifted – they are everywhere and affecting all abilities – whether child or adult. And the children (and adults) who have them, do the same thing – they give up on things when they get hard because to fail will make them feel bad. Growth mindset children (and adults) relish the learning opportunity that is presented by a challenge. They see the world in a different way.
What are mindsets?
Putting it crudely - if you think your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change much, you have a fixed mindset and if you think you can change how intelligent you are, you have a growth mindset.
You don’t just have to use only the notion of intelligence to work out which mindset you have because many of us are mixtures of approaches and have some abilities we have fixed mindsets about and others where we have growth ones.
So think about areas like artistic talent, music, maths, business skill or swimming or being able to read a map and see whether these are things you feel you can learn to improve or have a fixed quotient of skill. Do you get the idea?
Incidentally, fixed mindsets are far more prevalent in maths, art and music than they are in other subjects yet all of these areas are learnable.
Professor Dweck’s central proposition is that the growth mindset can be learned and teachers and parents need to teach it. They also need to change their own mindsets if they are fixed.
Because what everyone should know about IQ is that Alfred Binet, the developer of the IQ test, said that intelligence was not fixed and could be learned.
He was aghast that some people used his work to say that intelligence was fixed – he described that as “brutal pessimism”. The latest scientific research has reinforced this with its findings on the plasticity of brains – the ability of the brain to make new connections when confronted with new material and new situations.
The core competencies of intelligence can be trained and mindsets can be changed if people believe the arguments and put them into practice.
But Professor Dweck’s argument is that an individual with a fixed mindset wants to look intelligent at all costs. They don’t want take risks. They are the kind of the kind of child who doesn’t want to ride a bike because they fell off once, the kind of student who will want to drop a subject if their grades are not as good as their grades in others, the kind of adult who says they are rubbish at maths or reading a map because, at some point in the past it all got too difficult – for whatever reason – and they stopped learning.
The growth mindset wants to learn, learn and learn some more – it doesn’t matter if it’s hard, it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes – they recognize that’s when real learning takes place.
So mindsets matter
Dweck quoted research she and her team undertook over two years on students who were around 13 when their mindsets were measured at the start of grade 7 – a time in American schools where the work gets harder and classes are less personal than they are for younger students.
The student group all had very similar grades at the beginning of the research exercise but by the end of the first term in grade 7 – when faced with harder work – their scores had begun to diverge; the students with the growth mindset were doing better than their fixed mindset peers. By the end of the two year study period the two groups had grown even further apart.
The students showed distinct differences in their approach to school work as can be seen in the following quotes:
Fixed mindset student:
“The main thing I want when I do my school work is to show how good I am at it.”
Growth mindset student:
“It’s much more important to me to learn things in my classes than it is to get the best grade.”
Mindsets affect how much we pay attention to learning.
She quoted another piece of research which involved brain scans done while students with differing mindsets did a general knowledge test which was followed by the answers.
In the growth mindset individuals, the brain showed heightened attention when they were told whether they were correct or not and when they were given the correct answer – they were interested in learning the answer if they had got it wrong. The fixed mindset brains only showed heightened attention when they were told whether they were correct or not, but not when the answer was then given.
The students were then given a surprise retest on the same material and the growth mindset individuals then scored significantly higher than the fixed mindset ones; they knew the material better because they had wanted to learn from where they went wrong and listened to the correct answers. The fixed mindset individuals appeared only interested when they were right, so learned nothing new.
Fixed mindset student: “To tell the truth, when I work hard at my school work it makes me feel I’m not very smart.”
Growth mindset student: “The harder you work at something, the better you’ll be at it.”
Geniuses have to work hard – we all have to cope with setbacks
Dweck emphasised even geniuses have to work hard to achieve what they do. Research on geniuses reveal people who are dedicated to what they do, who labour hard, engage in deliberate practice to make them better, who build strengths systematically and address their weaknesses. Real genius takes time and effort to create.
So a fixed mindset – a belief that you shouldn’t need to try hard to be good at something – was the worst belief anyone could have and puts them at a huge disadvantage. “That’s why some of our bright students stop working at school,” said Dweck. “They bump up against work that is difficult and choose to retire at that point. They are frightened by effort and they don’t know how to push past that fear.”
In the face of setbacks, students with a fixed mindset have no strategies for recovering from failure – because the typical fixed mindset will try to justify failure by blaming others, or trying to feel superior – or just by giving up and retreating into their personal comfort zone.
She quoted a fascinating experiment she carried out with some Stanford University students ie with very bright students. She got students to come into the brain lab one by one, gave them a very difficult test (at which they all did poorly) and then asked them whether they would like to look at the results of other students who had done the test.
They were given the option of looking at the tests of students who did worse and those who did better than they did. Guess which mindset picked which? A no brainer really – the fixed mindset students wanted to look at the tests of people who did worse than they did (so that they could feel better about their own result) and the growth mindset students wanted to look at the tests of people who had done better (so that they could learn new strategies).
Where do mindsets come from?
Dweck believes that the language parents and teachers use to talk to children and students tells them exactly what these important adults value.
So getting good scores in a test becomes more valuable than learning from it. When children/students are praised, most of it focuses on intelligence (What a clever boy/girl). Children and young people are being told that, deep down, adults value intelligence – not effort and hard work, not persistence and resilience in the face of adversity – but unalterable intelligence that they believe they can see deep inside the child.
But praise for intelligence harms achievement
Dweck ran a non-verbal IQ test with three groups of children.
Group 1 was praised for intelligence:” Wow, that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.”
Group 2 was praised for effort (process): Wow, that’s a really good score. You must have tried really hard.”
Group 3, the control, was praised just for the score: “Wow, that’s a really good score.”
The outcome of the test was startling – it had made the group praised for intelligence into non-learners, said Dweck.
Offered next the choice of a second task within their comfort zone – something they could do – or a new task they could learn something important from, the students praised for effort were much keener on trying something new than were the students praised for intelligence. The control group was in the middle.
Infact, the findings were so marked the researchers repeated the test five times with other sets of children to make sure they were not getting rogue results. The results were the same each time. In some groups, 90 per cent of the children praised for effort wanted to have a crack at the difficult task they could learn from.
Next, the groups were given a hard test and it was here that the group praised for intelligence originally did the worst of all three groups. They lost confidence and enjoyment while the growth mindset group gained it. They wanted to do more tests. The three groups were then given an easier test and the growth mindset group actually increased their performance compared with the original test. They had taught themselves new strategies and they had increased their performances in what was an IQ test!
The final piece of the research had the most worrying outcome. The children were offered the chance to write a message to “other children” who were going to be involved in the research in which they could describe how they did.
Forty per cent of the group praised for intelligence lied about their scores – they increased them. Some of the students in the other two groups also lied but the percentages were much smaller.
Said Dweck: “For these children a failure is so humiliating they can’t even admit it to themselves. We don’t want our kids to feel that a deficiency is a failure but to acknowledge what they don’t know and make the effort to learn.”
So what should parents praise?
- Effort, struggle, persistence despite setbacks
- Strategies, choices
- Choosing difficult tasks
- Learning, improving
“They need to manage their persistence – to gain and maintain their own self esteem. We are wired to learn by persistence. Working hard … struggle, is something that you should value. Round the dinner table you should be discussing your own struggles so that you can teach children that what they are doing – struggling sometimes – is what they should be doing to learn.”
And what shouldn’t they say?
- “Look, you got an A without really working. You must be good at math!”
- “You did that so quickly and easily. That’s impressive!”
- Instead they should try
- “You got an A without working. You must not be learning much.”
- “You did that so quickly and easily. I’m sorry I wasted your time. Let’s do something you can learn from.”
The idea is to make children/students feel “easy is boring, hard is fun”.
Conclusion
A growth mindset allows children to:
- Embrace learning and growth
- Understand the role of effort in creating talent
- Maintain confidence and effectiveness in the face of challenges and setbacks
And it can be taught…
By a growth mindset parent or teacher who:
- Portrays skills as learnable
- Values passion, effort, improvement over natural talent
- Presents themselves as a mentor/collaborator rather than a judge.
So which kind of a parent do you want to be and which kind of mindset do you want your child to have? The choice is yours.
Further information :
Dweck and colleagues have developed a computer based growth mindset workshop called Brainology. Go to http://www.brainology.us/
If you want to read Carol Dweck’s book on the subject it’s called ‘Mindset’.
