Moxie Mental Health

How to Teach Children Self-Efficacy:  Nurture a Growth Mindset

If you could use science to help your child earn better grades, would you?

What if, at the same time, you could help your child discover that learning is a blast!

The good news is—a strategy has been developed at Stanford University that makes this magic work. It has been has tested on hundreds of students to validate the results.  This strategy appears to turn kids on to the joy of learning and make better grades at school. The strategy is so simple; it can be done at home.

But here’s the catch: You may have to change how you think about things. You have to be willing to believe these two things.

• Failure is part of the learning process. It’s okay to make mistakes—they don’t define us.
• Skill comes from trying new things that will help you learn more.

Mindset Makes All the Difference

The power to ignite the love of learning in children comes from understanding how to influence their “mindset”. A “mindset” is a personal theory—in this case, the person’s theory about how success in life is achieved. Dr. Dweck identified two contrasting “mindsets” from which people approach success.

• A “fixed mindset” is the belief that success is a “gift” or a natural endowment of talent.  Children who have a fixed mindset about success are afraid of failure, as it may indicate that they (the child) just don’t have what it takes to succeed.
• A “growth mindset” is the belief that people can develop success through practice and hard work.  Children with a growth mindset accept failure as feedback to try harder next time.

Praise Children’s “Effort” Rather than “Being Smart”

To test her ideas about mindset, Dr. Dweck and her colleagues divided hundreds of junior high students into two groups and followed their progress for two years.  Initially, they gave both groups of students a fairly difficult set of ten questions from a nonverbal IQ test. The experimenters then created the two mindsets by the feedback they gave the students.

• The “fixed mindset” was created by praising one of the groups for “being smart.”
• The “growth mindset” was created by praising the other group for “working really hard.”

Though before the praise, the groups were the same; the differences began appearing immediately after the praise. The students were then given their choice of tasks, both easy and challenging.

• The group praised for “being smart” started rejecting choosing new tasks that they could learn from. They didn’t want to do anything that would call into question their talent.
• Ninety percent of the group that were praised for “working hard” choose a more challenging task that they could learn from.

Then Dweck’s researchers gave both groups of children some harder questions that they didn’t do so well on.

• The group praised for being smart thought that the reason they did not do well on the new questions was because they were not so smart after all. They didn’t think the problems were so fun.
• The group praised for making good effort thought the difficulty meant that they should “apply more effort.” Many of them thought the harder problems were more fun the easier problems.

Dweck’s researchers then gave both groups some more easy questions.

• The group originally praised for being smart plummeted in their performance on the easy questions.
• The group originally praised for working hard showed improved performance.

During the two years the groups were studied, the “growth mindset” group that was consistently praised for working hard was eager learners and their grades improved. As success built upon success, they did not need prompting to do their homework.The “fixed mindset” group who were praised for being smart became more self-conscious, more shy, lacked the enthusiastic learning style of the other group, and had lower grades.

How can you encourage your children to have “growth mindsets?”  Read the next post on Moxie Mental Health.

Katrina

Works Cited
Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007.

Katrina Holgate Miller, PhD writes about the strengths and skills people use to face their mental health issues with empowerment (moxie) rather than victimization. She has turned her 30+ years of clinical experience with thousands of clients into stories and tips about how her clients were able to recover from mental illness and addiction and return to the roles they enjoyed during times of wellness.  She is author of the website www.moxiementalhealth.com.  Her email is katrina@moxiementalhealth.com

***Readers may freely reprint articles, with the condition that credit is given to Katrina Holgate Miller and this resource box is included in the reprint.