Mindset is a word and concept that has risen to prevalence in educational circles in recent years. Some believe that it's the single most important factor contributing to learning approaches and outcomes for students. As such, it's a concept that I have been very interested in and was keen to delve deeper into. I headed straight* to two academic papers in particular that shed light on the subject.
Mangels, J. (2006). Why do beliefs about intelligence influence learning success? A social cognitive neuroscience model. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, [online] 1(2), pp.75-86
Blackwell, L., Trzesniewski, K. and Dweck, C. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child development, 78(1), pp.246-263.
I was lucky enough to have the chance to summarise some of the key points from these two papers and present them to the University of Tasmania's Centre for University Pathways and Partnerships (on 19 June 2014). The presentation can be seen in full (25 minutes in total, in 2 parts) in the following two videos and a PDF of the slides can be found at the bottom of this post.
Conclusions: 1. Mindset Matters! 2. Mindset is Malleable!
I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on mindset or on what you got out of this presentation, please feel free to comment below.
Edit: check out some great resources on Mindset here. They can be used to share Mindset ideas with students and colleagues.
*I actually began by exploring Carol Dweck's book Mindset, How You Can Fulfil Your Potential (2012) but I really struggled to read it as, though it clearly has some very important points in it, it felt ‘filled out' with anecdotal stories that I found very monotonous. I then went back to her earlier (2006) book, Mindset, the New Psychology of Success only to discover that it's the same book! Another frustration was that the referencing in both of these books wasn't any form of standard referencing, instead the notes section in the back simply had entries such as “We offered four-year-olds a choice: This research was done with Charlene Hebert, and was followed up by work with Pat Smiley, Gail Heyman, and Kathy Cain”. (The section in bold refers to an in-text comment). This format of referencing made it very hard to track the claims that were made in the books as well as find the subsequent literature to which Carol Dweck was referring. This is not to say that Dweck isn't one of the (if not the) main contributors to this field, simply to say that if you are interested in exploring Mindset in depth I would suggest targeting journal articles.