Growth Mindset: Definition, Evidence and How to Develop It

What Is a Growth Mindset?

A growth mindset is the belief that abilities such as intelligence, talent and skill can be developed through effort, good strategies and help from others. Its opposite, a fixed mindset, is the belief that these abilities are basically set and cannot change much. The terms were popularized by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck in her 2006 book Mindset, but they rest on decades of research she and colleagues carried out on what they originally called implicit theories of intelligence.

The idea matters because beliefs about ability shape how people respond to difficulty. If you think intelligence is fixed, a hard problem or a poor mark can feel like a verdict on who you are, so avoiding challenges makes sense. If you think ability can grow, the same setback is information about what to work on next. Growth mindset is now one of the most widely used ideas in educational psychology, and also one of the most debated.

Where the Idea Came From

In the 1970s, Dweck studied how children responded to failure. In experiments where children were given problems that turned out to be too hard, some became discouraged, blamed their ability and gave up, a pattern she linked to learned helplessness. Others stayed engaged, tried new strategies and sometimes said they enjoyed the challenge.

In a 1988 paper, Dweck and Ellen Leggett proposed that these patterns reflected different beliefs. Children who held an entity theory (intelligence is a fixed entity) tended to pursue performance goals, trying to look smart and avoid looking dumb. Children who held an incremental theory (intelligence can be increased) tended to pursue learning goals, trying to get better. These goal differences helped explain why some children persisted and others gave up. "Fixed" and "growth" mindset are the everyday names that later replaced "entity" and "incremental."

Fixed vs Growth Mindset

Dweck emphasizes that this is not a split between two types of people. Everyone holds a mixture, and mindsets can vary by domain: someone may believe they can improve at cooking but not at maths. Stress, failure or comparison with a highly skilled colleague can trigger fixed-mindset reactions even in people who usually think in growth terms.

What Growth Mindset Is Not

• It is not just effort. Effort that repeats an ineffective strategy does not help. Growth mindset includes changing strategies and seeking help.
• It is not positive thinking or high self-esteem. It is a specific belief about whether ability can change.
• It does not claim anyone can become anything. People differ in aptitude, and growth mindset does not deny that. It claims that wherever you start, you can usually improve.
• It is not a label to give someone. Dweck has warned against a "false growth mindset", in which adults claim the label, praise effort that is not producing learning, or use mindset as a consolation for poor results.

The Science Behind Mindsets

The Praise Study (Mueller and Dweck, 1998)

In a series of studies with fifth-grade children, Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck gave all children a set of problems and then praised some for their intelligence ("You must be smart at these problems") and others for their effort ("You must have worked hard"). After a later set of difficult problems, children praised for intelligence enjoyed the task less, persisted less and performed worse on a final set than children praised for effort. They were also more likely to choose easy tasks that would let them keep looking smart, and in one study more likely to exaggerate their scores when describing them to another child. The study became the basis for the widespread advice to praise process rather than traits.

The Adolescent Transition Study (Blackwell, Trzesniewski and Dweck, 2007)

Lisa Blackwell and colleagues followed students in New York City through the transition to junior high school. Students who endorsed a growth view of intelligence at the start showed rising maths grades over two years, while those with a more fixed view did not. In a second study, a small eight-session workshop teaching that the brain grows with learning appeared to halt a decline in maths grades compared with a control workshop on study skills. These were promising but small studies.

Brain Responses to Mistakes

In a 2011 study using EEG, Jason Moser and colleagues found that people who endorsed more of a growth mindset showed a stronger brain response linked to conscious attention to errors (the error positivity, or Pe) and were more likely to improve after making a mistake. This fits the idea that people with growth beliefs engage more with their errors, though it is a single correlational study.

How Neuroplasticity Fits In

Growth mindset is often linked to neuroplasticity, the brain's capacity to change with experience. Learning really does change connections between neurons, and teaching students this is part of many mindset programs. But neuroplasticity does not mean that anyone's abilities are unlimited, and the research question is not whether the brain can change but whether believing it can change affects how people learn.

What the Evidence Shows Now

As growth mindset spread into schools and businesses in the 2010s, researchers began testing it at scale, and the picture became more nuanced than early studies suggested.

Meta-Analyses

In a 2018 pair of meta-analyses, Victoria Sisk, Brooke Macnamara and colleagues found that the correlation between students' mindsets and their academic achievement was weak on average (about r = 0.10), and that the average effect of mindset interventions on achievement was very small. Effects were larger for students from lower-income families and for academically at-risk students. In 2023, two further meta-analyses in Psychological Bulletin reached different emphases: one led by Jeni Burnette concluded that interventions can help some groups under the right conditions, while one by Macnamara and Alexander Burgoyne concluded that, after accounting for weaknesses in study design and reporting, there was little reliable evidence of an overall effect on achievement.

The National Study of Learning Mindsets

The strongest single study is a 2019 randomized trial in Nature led by David Yeager, Dweck and many colleagues. About 12,000 ninth-grade students in a nationally representative sample of US public schools completed two short online sessions, under an hour in total, that taught a growth mindset. Among lower-achieving students, grades in core classes rose slightly (by about 0.10 grade points on a 4-point scale) compared with controls, and across the sample more students enrolled in advanced maths the following year. Effects were stronger in schools whose peer culture supported taking on challenges, which suggests the environment matters as much as the message.

Large-Scale Surveys

In the OECD's PISA 2018 survey of 15-year-olds across many countries, students who disagreed that intelligence is something they cannot change much tended to score higher in reading, after accounting for background, though the size of the link varied widely between countries and such data cannot prove cause and effect.

A Fair Summary

Mindset is one influence on learning among many, and on its own it is not a large one. Brief interventions are cheap and can help some students, especially those who are struggling or in supportive environments, but they are not a cure-all, and early claims about large effects were overstated. Dweck and her collaborators have themselves argued that the key questions are now for whom and under what conditions mindset interventions work.

Mindsets Beyond the Classroom

Researchers have applied mindset ideas to other domains with varying evidence. In sport, beliefs that athletic ability can be developed are linked to mastery-focused goals and persistence, connecting to achievement goal theory. In workplaces, Dweck and colleagues studied organizations whose cultures emphasized developing people versus prizing innate talent, and found employees in development-focused cultures reported more trust and willingness to take risks; this work relies on surveys rather than experiments. Claims that "growth mindset companies" have specific percentages higher engagement or profit should be treated with caution unless their source is clear.

Mindset research also touches on wellbeing. A line of research led by Jessica Schleider has tested brief single-session programs, which include teaching that personality and feelings can change, as one way to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression in adolescents, with some promising results. These programs are studied as supplements to, not replacements for, professional care; persistent low mood or anxiety warrants support from a qualified professional.

How to Develop a Growth Mindset

Based on the research, these practices are the most likely to help. None is a guarantee, and they work best when the surrounding environment also supports learning.

1. Learn how learning works. Understanding that skills develop through practice, feedback and better strategies makes it easier to see struggle as normal.
2. Notice your fixed-mindset triggers. Pay attention to situations that make you feel judged, such as criticism, a setback or a comparison with someone more skilled, and how you react.
3. Add "yet", then add a plan. "I can't do this yet" is helpful only if it is followed by "so I will try a different approach or ask for help."
4. Set learning goals alongside performance goals. Aim to master a technique or understand a concept, not only to get a particular score (see goal setting).
5. Treat mistakes as data. After an error, ask what caused it and what you would change, rather than what it says about you.
6. Seek specific feedback. Ask people with expertise what to improve, and practise those points deliberately.
7. Track progress over time. Comparing your current work with your own earlier work makes improvement visible and builds self-efficacy.

Growth Mindset in Education

For teachers, the research points less to posters and slogans than to everyday practices:

• Process-focused feedback. Comment on strategies, effort that leads to learning, persistence and improvement, rather than on being smart or talented.
• High standards with support. David Yeager and colleagues' studies of "wise feedback" found that critical comments on essays prefaced with a note saying the teacher had high standards and believed the student could reach them led more students to revise their work, especially among students who might mistrust the school's intentions.
• Normalizing struggle. Present difficulty as an expected part of learning, and share examples of how skilled people improved.
• Room to revise. Opportunities to revise work after feedback make growth concrete.
• Avoiding the pitfalls. Praising effort that is not producing learning, telling students to "just have a growth mindset", or overlooking real learning difficulties can backfire.

Parenting With a Growth Mindset

Parents can support a growth mindset by talking about how skills develop, focusing questions on learning ("What did you try? What would you do differently?"), letting children experience manageable struggle rather than rescuing them at once, and modelling how they themselves learn from mistakes. Interestingly, research by Kyla Haimovitz and Dweck in 2016 found that parents' own mindsets about intelligence did not reliably pass to their children; what mattered more was how parents reacted to their children's failures. Children whose parents treated failure as a disaster were more likely to develop fixed views, while those whose parents treated it as a chance to learn were more likely to develop growth views.

Criticisms and Limitations

• Small average effects. Large studies show much smaller effects than early studies and popular books implied.
• Replication concerns. Some studies, including a 2019 large replication by Li and Bates of the praise findings, failed to reproduce key results, while others have succeeded. Results seem to depend on context and implementation.
• Over-simplification in practice. In schools and workplaces, the idea is often reduced to slogans or effort praise, which researchers say is unlikely to help.
• Structural factors. Critics worry that emphasizing individual beliefs can distract from poverty, under-resourced schools and other barriers that limit achievement regardless of mindset.
• Researcher involvement. Some analyses found larger effects in studies involving the theory's developers, which may reflect better implementation or bias; independent replications remain important.

None of this makes growth mindset worthless. The core idea, that how people interpret difficulty affects whether they persist and learn, fits well with research on self-efficacy, learned helplessness and motivation. The lesson from the last decade is to treat mindset as one helpful ingredient in good teaching and learning, not as a magic switch.