At MyGuru, we track feedback on our tutors’ performance to identify top performing tutors and provide constructive feedback about what made things go well or poorly. Over time, in discussing tutoring relationships with students and tutors and reviewing this feedback, we’ve noticed that the major obstacle standing in the way of a student understanding material and earning a better grade in a class (or a better score on a standardized test) is often a belief they have about their ability. It’s not a lack of understanding per se, and certainly not a lack of “intelligence” that’s the problem.
Certainly, with every tutoring relationship, there are facts a student needs to remember and concepts to be explained and better understood. However, the impact of general attitude and mindset is, in our experience, somewhat remarkably important. With this in mind, we did a little research to see if there was any statistically significant academic research about the importance of mindset in academic performance. The answer was an emphatic “yes.”
Here’s a quote pulled from the web-site of Dr. Carol Dweck, a world renowned Stanford Psychology Professor who has studied mindsets on and their impact on achievement and success for 30 years –
In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They’re wrong.
In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities.
According to Dweck, mindsets are critically important, and most well recognized and generally understood to be extremely successful people have had the growth mindset (Mozart, Michael Jordan, Albert Einstein), although some success stories have operated more within the fixed mindset (Patrick McEnroe, Bobby Knight).
Moving away from direct quotes from Dr. Dweck, in our experience, mindsets are important because they frame the way in which a student approaches studying. Let’s explore with a generic example of a student struggling in his or her pre-calculus course in high school.
In a fixed mindset, a student struggling with Pre-calculus may have a few beliefs that ultimately impacts greatly how he behaves and performs:
In a growth mindset, a student struggling with Pre-calculus may have a few beliefs that ultimately impacts greatly how he behaves and performs:
Upon reflection, most of MyGuru’s student do seem to clearly fit into one or the other mindset, although obviously there are many shades of grey.
The most important thing to take away is the understanding that mindsets are powerful, and that having the “growth” oriented one is clearly preferred. If your or your child’s mindset seems fixed, just knowing that there is another option is a big deal. Try to think about activities, tasks and challenges through a different, growth oriented lens moving forward. There are other specific strategies one can use to build a growth mindset, and Dweck covers them in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success – How We Can Learn to Fulfill Our Potential, by Carol S. Dweck, PhD. For example, always praise effort, not intelligence – this builds a growth mindset over time. For more tips on how to foster a growth mindset instead of a fixed one, visit USA Test Prep's article, "15 Tips to Remember when Promoting a Growth Mindset in the Classroom".
If you found this discussion of mindsets interesting, please check out our new book 99th Percentile: A Guide to Excelling on Standardized Tests – by Mark Skoskiewicz, where you’ll find us arguing that the “growth mindset” is one of the key pillars to getting a 99th percentile ACT, SAT, GMAT, or GRE score.