Growth Mindset

Young woman smiling looking at the front of the classroom from behind her laptop

The attitudes and beliefs that you and your students bring into the classroom influence academic performance. Growth mindset, or the belief that intelligence can be developed, plays a particularly important role in academic success and feelings of belonging (Murray et al. 2022). Students who believe that the efforts they put into their learning will improve their performance are more likely to persist through challenging topics, take more academic risks, and have higher performance (Smiley et al. 2016). Conversely, students with fixed mindsets believe that their intelligence is a stable trait, and are more likely to give up after experiencing setbacks. Further, instructor mindset can influence the attitudes that young students shape about their own intelligence (Melsor, Corbin, and Martin, 2019) and shape the academic performance and experience of college students (Canning et al. 2019). These patterns suggest that what we do as educators to foster a growth mindset in students, and ourselves, is an important component of higher education.

How can you encourage your students to adopt a growth mindset?

Everyone—undergraduate students, TAs, professors—is on a learning trajectory. No one is capable of knowing everything about a subject. Further, the production of knowledge is often a messy process involving failure. Many fields of study are focused on answering yet-unresolved ambiguities. Admitting to your students when you don’t know the answer to a question, sharing examples of “failure” in your field, and pointing out examples of unresolved debates all demonstrate to students that risk taking and failure are inherent to the academic journey. Explicitly give your students permission to fail, make errors, and struggle with uncertainty.

Opportunities to take risks: Like anything, taking risks (and failing!) takes practice. Many students believe they should already know all of the answers, and getting things wrong is a sign of failure. On the contrary, that is when learning happens! Give your students short, ungraded quizzes or mini-essay prompts that may be at the boundary of their current knowledge or skills. These assignments can let your students “fail” with no consequences to their grade. If you decide to implement such an assignment, make it clear to your students that it is ungraded and meant to challenge them.

Scaffolded assignments: Scaffolded assignments are large, long-term assignments that are broken down into smaller steps. Giving students opportunities to work on one section of an assignment at a time helps them develop specific skills and get feedback on how to improve subsequent attempts. Students can also see their progress throughout the course of the entire assignment, providing a perspective on their own learning development.

Introduce students to the concept of “deliberate practice”. Deliberate practice, first coined by Ericsson et al. (1993), is the development of skills through focusing on weaknesses and receiving continual feedback. This process can help a learner achieve expertise in a subject. Informing students about strategies such as deliberate practice helps them understand that abilities develop through time and that mistakes are an inherent part of the learning process. Work to provide actionable feedback for students to support their deliberate practice.

Students who are praised for their intelligence may then perceive challenging experiences as personal failures. Highlight achievements like effort put into an assignment, strategies used to prepare for an exam, or the teamwork skills built during a group project.

Written feedback on assignments can increase growth-mindset and sense of belonging for students (Murray et al. 2022). However, students can have a negative response to feedback they interpret as critical. Explaining to students that such feedback is provided because you have confidence that they can reach high academic standards helps boost student motivation to improve. Limit feedback so that it can be read and acted upon by students, focusing on key areas of improvement.

A deep understanding of a topic requires not just memorization, but accommodation of new information into existing mental frameworks. It can be helpful for students to realize that this can be hard work. Further, concepts that are central to your field of study can be difficult to grasp. Students should not assume that such foundational ideas are necessarily easy to understand. Further, it can be helpful for you to remember back to when you were learning these concepts so that you don’t make the assumption that your students fully understand them.