Controversy On Whether Growth Mindset Works Should Strengthen The Theory

It Might Even... Grow Its Impact

All too often education research falls short of giving educators on the ground actionable advice. But a recent controversy around Carol Dweck’s well-known growth mindset gives me hope that we can move forward with research that can better inform and support practitioners and students.

Over the last couple decades, education research has thankfully moved to embracing randomized control trial (RCT) when possible. Yet even if it gets to an RCT, education research still tends to stop there—at a stage where all a researcher can declare is that some intervention correlates with a desired outcome.

Research stuck in this stage can only tell us what works on average—what people call “best practices.” Yet what works on average often doesn’t work for a specific individual in a specific circumstance. It’s only by moving to more nuanced statements of what works for whom under what circumstance that allows researchers to offer actionable insights that educators can actually reliably and predictably use.

So how do we do that? The key is to move beyond inductive research that look for on-average correlations among large N-sizes to deductive research in which we hunt for anomalies—specific circumstances where the outcome we see isn’t what the RCT or large dataset of correlations and studies would have predicted.

Researchers often bemoan finding a failure to their theory. But anomalies are actually good news because they allow researchers to say, “There’s something else going on here.” And that is what leads to better understanding.

What often happens instead in education research is that one set of scholars does a study that shows a positive correlation between one set of recommended actions and a desired outcome and another set of scholars does another study showing something different. Yet almost always in these large datasets or RCTs there are anomalies—a particular student or class or school for which a given intervention didn’t produce the desired outcome—lurking.

When researchers avoid acknowledging the anomalies and instead simply attack each other’s opposing theories, all we get is a giant game of “my correlations are better than yours”—but nothing that actually helps people on the ground.

A recent controversy over Dweck’s famous growth mindset findings that

Melinda Wenner Moyer

covered in “Is Growth Mindset a Sham?” captures the point.