Comments on: Growth Mindset 3: A Pox On Growth Your Houses

By: MW

MW — Mon, 04 May 2015 15:52:50 +0000

Despite the sense to prove that the growth mindset is invalid, I think this is a good opportunity to dive deeper into the lives of these students. In order to actualize in the growth mindset, one must rise above the duality of good/bad, aka the fixed mindset. This sense of good/bad starts when we our young, being told we are good and bad based on behaviors that inconvenience our parents/caregivers (i.e. spilled milk, etc). How many of us had healthy experiences were we spilled milk and our parents took a step back, showed us how to clean it up and allowed us to practice on how to pour out of the same container, in a tone that was not angry or resentful? Now I’m curious on how deep rooted the fixed mindset is with the students, seems to me the deeper the fixed, less likelihood of understanding of growth.

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By: Aaron Brown

Aaron Brown — Fri, 01 May 2015 04:38:23 +0000

The comments policy is that comments should be at least two of true, kind, and necessary. Your comment might be true in the sense that you didn’t like the post, but it’s not kind, and it can’t be necessary considering you didn’t even say why you thought the post was a waste of time.

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By: C ariss

C ariss — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 23:54:42 +0000

Reading that was a waste of time.

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By: Larry Kestenbaum

Larry Kestenbaum — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 23:17:03 +0000

Yow. That is pretty awful.

I feel bad for N.C., but I realize it’s probably not much better anywhere else in the U.S. And how-to-educate-kids is not an easy problem.

I really appreciate seeing comments from someone like yourself who is actually out there, dealing with these issues and this crappy research in the real world.

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By: Janet Johnson

Janet Johnson — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 22:17:09 +0000

Did I miss it, or did they explain how they identified the most at-risk students? Who are the students who are at-risk of dropping out? Normally, unless they say otherwise, this means the Black kids, regardless of their academic success or family education levels and the kids who are thought to be poor.

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By: David Friedman

David Friedman — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 22:05:09 +0000

I haven’t read the study. How did they define “at risk?”

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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 21:33:25 +0000

What I noticed is that they do not define in a quantitative way what they mean by “at risk of dropping out.”

Yes, they did. They defined it as a fall GPA of 2.0 or a failed core class.

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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 21:23:00 +0000

Yes, they did define “at risk,” and, no, it doesn’t mean black or poor.

But of course you just keep saying exactly the same things about this study as you said about everything else, even though you claim to have read this study.

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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 21:20:01 +0000

One of the interventions has mindset in the name. The other doesn’t.

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By: shemtealeaf

shemtealeaf — Sun, 26 Apr 2015 20:54:05 +0000

You might be right that the paper is geared to support growth mindset, but I don’t think I would have really noticed that without being primed to think about the study as a potential piece of evidence in favor of growth mindset.

If it were me, I might have titled the study “SOME Mindset Interventions Are A Scalable Treatment For Academic Overachievement”, but I don’t have a huge issue with their omission of the qualifier ‘some’. Even if they had tested five different interventions and only one of them worked, I still think that would be decent evidence in favor of the general concept of mindset interventions.

Of course, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt and hoping that the next study from these researchers investigates the potential benefits of the ‘sense of purpose’ intervention. If we just get more growth mindset research, then your suspicion will be largely vindicated.

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