Growth Mindset: What It Can and Cannot Do

Growth mindset may be the most famous idea to cross from psychology into schools this century — and one of the most garbled in transit. The original research says something real and useful. The poster on the classroom wall often says something else.

What the research actually showed

The foundation is Mueller and Dweck’s 1998 praise experiments: children praised for intelligence subsequently avoided challenge and deteriorated after failure, while children praised for effort and strategy sought challenge and persisted. The claim is about how children interpret ability and setback — believing capability can grow changes how difficulty is read. Two decades later, Yeager, Dweck and colleagues (2019) ran a national randomised experiment across 65 American schools: a short, well-designed mindset intervention produced modest but real grade improvements for lower-achieving students, with effects strongest where the school’s peer culture supported challenge-seeking.

What it cannot do

The same national study is the honest corrective: effects were modest, concentrated, and context-dependent — not a transformation of everyone’s attainment. Mindset messaging cannot substitute for teaching, curriculum or challenge; telling a child to “believe in yourself” while the work stays undemanding changes nothing except the child’s vocabulary. And a false growth mindset — praising effort that is not actually producing learning — teaches children that effort is a performance, which is the original fixed-mindset trap wearing a new shirt.

The version worth keeping

Three practices survive the hype cycle intact. Praise process specifically: name the strategy, the revision, the persistence that worked — not the child’s brain. Treat struggle as information: when work is hard, the conversation is “what does this difficulty tell us about the next step?”, not reassurance. And pair belief with genuine challenge: mindset matters most exactly when a learner meets work they cannot yet do — so the school’s job is to make sure such work regularly exists, which for able learners is precisely the job schools most often skip.

That pairing — belief plus real challenge, reviewed on evidence — is the shape of our whole framework.

References

Mueller, C. M., & Dweck, C. S. (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children’s motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 33–52.
Yeager, D. S., et al. (2019). A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement. Nature, 573, 364–369.