In one set of experiments, the only thing that differed between groups of fifth graders was a single sentence. After a round of puzzles, some children were told they must be smart at these problems; others were told they must have worked hard at them. Then everyone hit a much harder round, was told they had done a lot worse, and the two groups pulled apart. On a final round as easy as the first, the children praised for being smart scored lower than before, and the children praised for effort scored higher.
Studies like that one turned “growth mindset” into a school slogan. The research itself makes a smaller claim. A belief about whether ability can grow seems to change how people read a setback, and through that, how long they stay with hard work. Its effect on grades is small, and it depends on who is studied and where.
What a Mindset Is
Psychologists call it an implicit theory of intelligence: your often unstated view of whether intelligence is fixed or can be developed. A fixed mindset treats intelligence as a set amount that each performance reveals. A growth mindset treats it as something that can grow with effort, good strategies and help from others. Believing that ability can grow “does not imply that everyone has exactly the same potential in every domain,” Blackwell, Trzesniewski and Dweck (2007) add.
Dweck and her students proposed that each mindset sits at the core of a meaning system, a set of goals, beliefs about effort and explanations for success and failure that hang together (Dweck & Yeager, 2019). With a fixed view, they suggested, “high effort may more readily be seen as indicating low ability.” A setback reads as a verdict on ability, and persistence can drop. With a growth view, effort is part of the method, and a setback says something about how the learning is going.
Mindsets can be measured as fairly stable differences between people (Blackwell et al., 2007), yet experiments can shift them, at least for a while (Hong et al., 1999, as cited in Dweck & Yeager, 2019). The pathway the researchers propose runs through motivation. In Blackwell’s school study, mindsets predicted grades through goals, beliefs about effort and responses to setbacks. None of the studies below measured a change in intelligence or memory capacity.
One Sentence of Praise
Mueller and Dweck (1998) ran their experiments one child at a time, in an empty classroom at school. Each child worked on ten puzzles from Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a nonverbal reasoning test, and was told it was “a really high score,” whatever the real result. The praise came next, and then the harder set, after which every child heard they had done “a lot worse.”
After that setback, the children praised for intelligence enjoyed the puzzles less and were less keen to take the problems home. Even before any failure, they more often chose easy problems that would let them look smart. They were also more likely to describe intelligence as a fixed trait afterward. The praise was enough to make the groups differ in that belief, at least for that day.
The result has limits. The article reports six experiments with about 400 children aged roughly 9 to 12. Each was a single session with novel puzzles, and the experimenters arranged the success and, in most of the studies, the failure. The authors note that children “may respond somewhat differently to praise for other types of tasks and in other settings” (p. 50). The work shows what praise can do in one sitting. It says nothing directly about how a medical student handles a bad practice exam.
From One School to a National Trial
Blackwell et al. (2007) took the question into a real school. They followed 373 seventh graders at a New York City public school through the two years of junior high, a stretch when grades often fall. Students’ theories of intelligence were unrelated to their earlier math test scores. Yet students who started with a growth view earned rising math grades while fixed-view students stayed flat. Their higher eighth-grade grades held even when the researchers accounted for sixth-grade test scores.
The study was correlational, so what it can show is the route. The link ran through learning goals, beliefs about effort and fewer helpless explanations of failure. It also ran through what the authors called positive strategies, which were students’ ratings of how they would respond to an imagined failure (for example, “I would work harder in this class from now on”).
A second study, in a different and lower-achieving school, randomly assigned 91 seventh graders, by advisory group (a homeroom-style class), to one of two eight-week workshops. Both covered the brain and study skills. One group also read an article titled “You Can Grow Your Intelligence”; the control group learned mnemonics instead. Grades had been falling in both groups. Afterward, the decline stopped only in the growth group. It was small, in one school, with short follow-up. The authors add a point that matters for this series. Students with a fixed view had seemed to be doing fine before junior high, and “motivational beliefs may not have an effect until challenge is present and success is difficult” (p. 258).
Yeager et al. (2019) then tested a brief online version across the country. The preregistered trial (analysis plan public before the results came in) included 12,490 ninth graders in a nationally representative sample of US public high schools, randomized to two short online sessions or to a control module on brain function. The planned analysis focused on lower-achieving students, those at or below their school’s median grades. Their end-of-year grades in core courses were about a tenth of a grade point higher than those of similar control students, and fewer of them finished with D or F averages.
The effect was smaller in the highest-achieving schools. It was larger where peer norms supported taking on challenge, judged by how many hard math problems control students chose to try. Those norms were measured, not manipulated, so their causal role is uncertain. The authors compare the intervention to “a high-quality seed” that needs the right soil (p. 368). Both trials measured grades; Yeager’s team also looked, in an exploratory analysis, at enrolment in advanced math the next year. Neither tested memory for studied material, so neither tells you anything about retention.
Small Effects, and a Common Misuse
Dweck and Yeager (2019) call the effects on academic outcomes “of course modest,” concentrated in students at risk of underperforming. A tenth of a grade point is meaningful, they argue, because most education interventions find no effect at all. They also warn that results are “highly dependent on subtle features of the materials and procedures,” and may not carry over to colleges or workplaces without new rounds of development. The studies in this post, and most that Dweck and Yeager review, involve children, adolescents and college students. A medical student studying alone at night has no classroom peer norms, and whether a belief about ability changes how that student persists is an open question.
Dweck also reports a “false growth mindset,” a term she credits to Susan Mackie. Some educators praised effort even when the effort was not working. Others told students they could do anything without giving them strategies to get there. That, Dweck writes, could leave students “increasingly frustrated and inept” when they fail to make progress toward their goals. “Persistence without progress,” she adds, “should always be questioned.” For a student, it may be the most useful sentence in the paper.
Using the Evidence Without the Slogan
The strategies earlier in this series, like retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving, often make practice feel worse at the time even when they improve long-term retention. It is plausible that your reading of that discomfort decides whether you keep going. No study in this set tests that link directly. Blackwell’s positive strategies were intentions to work harder, not choices between rereading and self-testing.
When a retrieval attempt fails, ask what it tells you about the material and the method, and leave your ability out of the explanation. Listen for the fixed-view story: “I’m not a pharmacology person” is an explanation of a setback that feels like a fact. Expect the belief to matter most when the work gets harder. Blackwell’s line about challenge suggests the first block of medical school, a new rotation or a board prep period is when to watch for it. And audit your persistence. If several sessions on a topic have not moved your error rate, change how you are studying it before adding hours. The metacognition post covers how to check.
If you teach, the same cautions apply. Praise for effort fared better than praise for intelligence in Mueller and Dweck’s experiments, but praising effort that is not working is the false version. In Blackwell’s study, study skills alone did not stop the decline in grades; the group that also got the belief lesson did better. Dweck also describes schools that put up posters or gave one lecture on growth mindset “and then returned to business as usual” (Dweck & Yeager, 2019). In the Yeager trial, the same brief program did more in schools where peers already took on hard problems, though those norms were measured, not manipulated. Encouragement with nothing in the course behind it is the version Dweck describes as false.
What This Looked Like for Me
I came into medicine with an MCAT score around the fiftieth percentile. By the time I sat my licensing exams, I scored at or above the 97th percentile on both Step 1 and Step 2. For a long time I explained that gap as effort, and there was plenty of effort. I now think I had also been running, without naming it, on a fixed view of my own ability, and at some point that view broke.
Early on, a concept that would not stick felt like a signal about me. I was not a chemistry person, not built for this. That story told me the discomfort of struggling meant I had reached my ceiling and should back off. Then I started treating a concept I could not hold onto as a problem of strategy. If retrieval practice on a topic kept failing, the question became which method to change, not whether I was capable.
I cannot separate the belief from everything else I changed in the same stretch: spacing, retrieval practice, interleaving, elaboration. I have no controlled experiment on myself. As far as I can tell, the change in how I read difficulty is what kept me using the harder strategies long enough for them to work.
The Core Lesson
A mindset is a belief about whether ability can grow, and its best-supported effects run through how people read setbacks and whether they persist. Its effect on grades is small and shows up mainly for struggling students in settings that reward challenge; in adult learners it is largely untested. The mindset evidence is about persistence and grades. The evidence for retention comes from the strategies earlier in this series, so keep those as the method, treat a failed attempt as information, and question persistence that is not producing progress.
The next post turns to something that sits even closer to the moment of study than belief: emotion, and how it shapes what you remember.
This post is part of a series on the science of learning. Each post covers one evidence-based principle and how to apply it to your own studying. Follow us on Instagram @acemeded to keep up with future blog posts and related content
References
Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Development, 78(1), 246–263.
Dweck, C. S., & Yeager, D. S. (2019). Mindsets: A view from two eras. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(3), 481–496.
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., Hanselman, P., Walton, G. M., Murray, J. S., Crosnoe, R., Muller, C., Tipton, E., Schneider, B., Hulleman, C. S., Hinojosa, C. P., Paunesku, D., Romero, C., Flint, K., Roberts, A., Trott, J., Iachan, R., Buontempo, J., Yang, S. M., Carvalho, C. M., … Dweck, C. S. (2019). A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement. Nature, 573(7774), 364–369.
