Does a growth mindset work? What the research shows about mindset and achievement

A “growth mindset” is the belief that abilities such as intelligence can be developed through effort and learning; a “fixed mindset” is the belief that they are set and hardly change. The idea comes from the research of the US psychologist Carol Dweck. In the research literature these beliefs are called implicit theories, and the fixed and growth mindsets are also known as entity and incremental theories (Sisk et al., 2018).

The theory began in research on motivation. In a 1988 paper, Dweck and Leggett proposed a model in which the implicit theories people hold steer them towards particular goals, and those goals lead either to a “mastery-oriented” response to difficulty, keeping at it, or to a “helpless” one, giving up (Dweck & Leggett, 1988). A 1995 paper summarised that people who see an ability as fixed tend to explain a failure by a fixed trait (“I failed the test because I am dumb”), while those who see it as changeable tend to point to something more specific, such as effort or strategy (Dweck et al., 1995).

Dweck and her colleague David Yeager stress that mindset theory is about how people respond to challenges and setbacks, not a theory of academic achievement in general, and that it does not claim to explain most of the differences in grades. It therefore predicts links between mindset and achievement mainly among people facing difficulties. Mindsets are not all-or-nothing: they sit on a continuum from fixed to growth, and the same person can be at different points at different times. Research usually measures them by how much people agree with statements such as “You have a certain amount of intelligence, and you really can’t do much to change it” (Yeager & Dweck, 2020).

This guide sets out how closely mindset is linked to grades, whether short lessons that change mindsets actually raise grades, and why two meta-analyses published in 2023 reached different conclusions, stating each side’s claims as made, and then what parents, teachers and you yourself can take from it, with how strong the evidence is. Most of the research is about students’ academic achievement. mind.io does not offer a mindset test. Grit, the tendency to keep working towards long-term goals, is covered in the grit guide.

As the growth mindset became widely known, misunderstandings spread with it. Writing in the US magazine Education Week in 2015, Dweck named the most common one as equating the growth mindset with effort. Effort matters, she wrote, but students also need to try new strategies and seek input from others when they are stuck. She also criticised praising students who are putting in effort but not learning, just to make them feel good (“Great effort! You tried your best!”), and suggested that when a student is stuck, teachers can appreciate the work so far but add: “Let’s talk about what you’ve tried, and what you can try next” (Dweck, 2015).

Dweck wrote that the growth mindset was meant to help close achievement gaps, not hide them: it is about telling the truth about a student’s current achievement and then doing something about it together. She also warned against using it to explain why some students are not learning (“Oh, he has a fixed mindset”). She described what her Australian colleague Susan Mackie called a “false growth mindset”: claiming a growth mindset while one’s words and actions do not reflect it. Her remedy was to acknowledge that everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets and probably always will be; “banning” the fixed mindset, she wrote, would only create false growth mindsets. She added that she and her colleagues may at first have put too much emphasis on sheer effort and made developing a growth mindset sound too easy (Dweck, 2015).

The OECD’s report on PISA 2018, the international assessment of 15-year-olds, also listed similar misunderstandings, citing Dweck: a growth mindset is not the same as being open-minded and flexible, it is not only about praising and rewarding effort, and it is not just telling students they can reach any goal. It needs a learning environment where students are not constantly judged and receive the support and feedback they need; when educators’ role is not recognised, the report says, the responsibility for failing lies entirely with the student, even one who lacks the necessary resources (OECD, 2019).

Nor does the growth mindset, as researchers use the term, claim that ability can change a lot or easily. Yeager and Dweck explain that a growth mindset intervention deals with the potential for ability to develop without promising how much or how easily, and does not say that ability does not matter or does not differ between students. They also distinguish telling students “you succeeded because you tried hard”, which changes what success is attributed to, from a growth mindset intervention (Yeager & Dweck, 2020). They note that people can hold mindsets about other characteristics too, such as personality (Yeager & Dweck, 2020); how much personality actually changes is covered in Can personality change?. How stable IQ scores really are, and what changes them, is covered in the IQ test guide.

A 2018 meta-analysis of studies on mindset and academic achievement pooled 273 effect sizes (365,915 people). The average correlation was r = .10, which the authors called “very weak”. 58% of the effect sizes were not significantly different from zero, and 6% went the other way, with a growth mindset significantly linked to lower achievement. By age, the correlation was r = .19 for children and r = .15 for adolescents, while for adults it was r = .02 and not significant. In this analysis, the size of the link did not differ significantly by academic risk or socioeconomic status (Sisk et al., 2018).

Yeager and Dweck, leading researchers of the theory, replied that the average came out small because the studies differed hugely and very small studies were given roughly the same weight as large ones. In the large data sets they cite, a growth mindset correlated r = .28 with English language arts scores and r = .27 with maths scores among 300,629 students in grades 4 to 7 in large California districts, and r = .34 with test scores among 168,533 tenth-graders in Chilean public schools (Yeager & Dweck, 2020). By contrast, a study of 433 fifth- and sixth-graders in China found no significant correlation between mindset and grades (Li & Bates, 2019, as described in Yeager & Dweck, 2020). Yeager and Dweck suggest that, besides other possible reasons such as a smaller convenience sample and the translation of the items, it may come from a cultural setting where the link between mindset and achievement is weak to begin with.

PISA 2018 asked 15-year-olds in many countries whether they agreed that “Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much”. On average across OECD countries, 37% agreed. Students who disagreed (the growth mindset side) scored 41 points higher in reading than those who agreed, and 32 points higher after accounting for the socio-economic profile of students and schools. According to the report, the gap was 22 points in Japan and 17 points in Korea; in Hong Kong there was no relationship, and in Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang (China) the association was negative. Korea was among the systems that read above the OECD average yet had a comparatively small share of students with a growth mindset (OECD, 2019).

The OECD was clear that PISA data cannot establish cause and effect: rather than a growth mindset producing good grades, strong students may answer that way because they have seen their own intelligence grow. In the same report, a growth mindset was positively associated with motivation to master tasks, self-efficacy and learning goals, and negatively with fear of failure (OECD, 2019). Taken together, the correlational studies show mindset and grades generally moving in the same direction, but the size of the link varies a great deal between studies and countries.

Mindset being linked to grades is not the same as changing mindsets raising grades. The second meta-analysis in the same 2018 paper pooled 43 effect sizes from growth mindset intervention studies (57,155 people), and the average effect was small, d = 0.08. It was larger for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (7 effect sizes, d = 0.34) and for students at high academic risk (8 effect sizes, d = 0.19), but the authors urged caution because few effect sizes and small samples lay behind these results, and high-risk students did not differ significantly from other students. In nearly half (46%) of the studies that checked whether the intervention actually changed students’ mindsets, they found no significant change, and the intervention effect was borderline significant only in the studies where no change was found (Sisk et al., 2018).

A leading large-scale test is the US National Study of Learning Mindsets, published in the journal Nature in 2019. In 65 schools chosen to represent regular US public high schools, 12,490 ninth-graders (aged 14 to 15) were randomly assigned, student by student, to an online growth mindset programme or to a control programme about brain functions that did not address beliefs about intelligence. Students worked through two sessions of about 25 minutes each on their own, roughly 20 days apart, and the programme used the metaphor that the brain is like a muscle that grows stronger and smarter through hard learning. The analysis plan was preregistered, and two research firms independent of the authors collected and processed the data (Yeager et al., 2019). An independent evaluation firm’s own analysis also found a significant effect for lower-achieving students, Yeager and Dweck report (Yeager & Dweck, 2020).

The preregistered target group was the 6,320 students whose grades were at or below their school’s median. By the end of ninth grade, their grade point average in core subjects (maths, science, English and social studies) was 0.10 points higher than in the control group (on a 0–4.3 scale; standardised effect 0.11), and the share with a D or F average fell from 46% to 41%. Among the 6,170 students above the median there was no significant effect. In an exploratory analysis that was not preregistered, in 41 schools (6,690 students), the share of students taking advanced maths (algebra II or higher) in tenth grade rose from 33% to 36% (Yeager et al., 2019).

The effect varied between schools. It was smaller in schools that were already high-achieving and larger where peers had a strong norm of taking on challenging problems; in low- and middle-achieving schools with such norms, the effect on grades was 0.14 to 0.18 points. The researchers noted, however, that school norms were measured rather than changed experimentally, so no causal conclusion can be drawn about them (Yeager et al., 2019). In a follow-up analysis that was not separately preregistered, which linked 9,167 maths-grade records of 8,775 students with their 223 maths teachers, the effect on maths grades was 0.11 points in classes whose teachers leaned towards a growth mindset but −0.02 points, not significant, in classes whose teachers leaned towards a fixed mindset (Yeager et al., 2022). In an experiment with 6,541 students in nearly all schools of two Norwegian counties, the share taking advanced maths rose from 46% to 49% (Rege et al., 2021).

Dweck, Yeager and other researchers who developed the theory took part in these studies. The 2019 paper declares no competing interests for the study, while disclosing that several authors have given paid or unpaid talks or consulting, that one co-founded an institute at Stanford University that offers free growth mindset programmes to schools, and that none has a financial relationship with any entity selling growth mindset products or services. The authors also stressed that not all forms of growth mindset intervention can be expected to raise grades (Yeager et al., 2019).

In 2023 the journal Psychological Bulletin published two meta-analyses of the same literature side by side. Macnamara and Burgoyne, who had also worked on the 2018 meta-analysis, analysed 63 studies (97,672 people). The overall average effect was small, d = 0.05, and not significant after correcting for publication bias. In the 13 studies (18,355 people) showing that the intervention actually changed students’ mindsets, it was d = 0.04, and in the 6 highest-quality studies (13,571 people) d = 0.02; neither was significant. They concluded that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws and bias (Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023a).

They pointed out that studies with an author who had a financial incentive to report positive findings were about 2.5 times as likely to report positive effects as studies without one, and that such authors published significantly larger effects. No theoretically meaningful moderator, such as age, academic risk or socioeconomic status, was significant either (Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023a, 2023b).

The meta-analysis by Burnette and colleagues in the same issue reached a different conclusion. Drawing on randomised experiments published from 2002 to the end of 2020, it pooled 53 independent samples testing distinct interventions, and focused less on a single average than on for whom and under what conditions effects appear. For the subgroups that the original researchers expected to benefit most, where the intervention was delivered with high fidelity, the effect was d = 0.14 on academic achievement and d = 0.32 on mental health. But the range of academic effects to be expected in future studies (the 95% prediction interval) was wide, −0.08 to 0.35, reaching below zero (Burnette et al., 2023). We read only the abstract of this study.

Replies from both sides followed. A commentary by Tipton and colleagues, co-written by Yeager, argued that averaging each study’s subgroups into a single effect buries effects in the groups where they were expected. In an exploratory re-analysis of Macnamara and Burgoyne’s data with Burnette and colleagues’ methods, they reported a meaningful, significant effect in at-risk groups and no significant moderation by financial conflict of interest. They also criticised counting talks or book income that came after a paper as a conflict of interest (Tipton et al., 2023). In their reply, Macnamara and Burgoyne said they had in fact included multiple effect sizes per study, and countered that the re-analysis did not just change the method but altered information such as effect sizes and at-risk codes in 22 of the 63 studies, often without explanation. They noted that several of the commentary’s authors also have financial incentives, and wrote that meta-analytic decisions should be made in advance, reported transparently and applied consistently (Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023b).

In short, the two sides do not really differ on growth mindset interventions not producing large effects for all students. Supporters point to the benchmark that, in large preregistered field experiments in education, effects of 0.15 or even 0.10 standard deviations count as large, and see the effects among lower-achieving students as meaningful (Yeager & Dweck, 2020; Tipton et al., 2023). Critics see such subgroup effects as possibly coming from weak study designs, bias and after-the-fact decisions (Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023b). The debate is not settled.

The advice to say “you worked hard” rather than “you’re so smart” spread from a study published in 1998. Across six studies, fifth-graders praised for intelligence cared more about performance goals relative to learning goals than children praised for effort, and after a failure they showed less persistence and less enjoyment, more often blamed low ability, and performed worse. Children praised for intelligence also more often described it as a fixed trait (Mueller & Dweck, 1998).

In 2019, a research team replicated and extended this work with 624 children aged 9 to 13 in China. In a first study that closely followed the original, the praise manipulation made a difference only to scores on a moderately difficult test after failure (p = .049), and no significant difference to the 8 motivation and attribution measures the original had used. In a second and third study that added an active control condition, no effect appeared, and in two studies following grades over a semester, a growth mindset was not linked to improving grades (Li & Bates, 2019). Yeager and Dweck replied that one of the three experiments replicated the original significantly and one marginally, that each was underpowered, and that pooling the three replicates the original study (Yeager & Dweck, 2020).

So the same data are read in different ways. We read only the abstracts of the two praise studies. In the sources we found for this guide, we found no large trials showing that praising effort alone raises grades in the long run. It is worth remembering that Dweck herself named praising effort without learning as a misunderstanding (Dweck, 2015).

What research has established is that the average effect of growth mindset lessons is small (Sisk et al., 2018; Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023a). In some large experiments, effects were larger for lower-achieving students, in schools where peers valued taking on challenges and in classes whose teachers leaned towards a growth mindset (Yeager et al., 2019, 2022). But school norms and teachers’ mindsets were measured rather than changed experimentally, so whether they caused the difference is not established, and whether such subgroup effects can be trusted is at the heart of the 2023 debate. Critics and supporters alike accept that large effects for all students are unlikely (Sisk et al., 2018; Tipton et al., 2023). Yeager and Dweck also write that interventions aimed at or delivered by teachers have not worked so far (Yeager & Dweck, 2020).

Advice for parents and teachers comes from theory and experience rather than from large trials that tested it directly. Dweck recommends talking about the process that leads to learning, such as the strategies tried, not just results, working out together what has been tried and what to try next when a child is stuck, and being honest about where the child currently stands (Dweck, 2015). The OECD report likewise stresses that telling children they can do it is not enough without challenging learning goals and the support and feedback they need (OECD, 2019). On that account, mindset messages cannot replace practical support such as extra help, suitable tasks and learning resources.

For yourself, a realistic step is Dweck’s suggestion to accept that everyone has a mix of fixed and growth mindsets, and to notice whether thoughts like “I’m just not good at this” come up when you face something hard, a setback, criticism or someone better than you (Dweck, 2015). This, too, has not been tested directly. If fear of failure makes it hard to start, the guide on perfectionism may help more directly; if you keep putting things off, the one on procrastination; if your successes feel like luck rather than ability, the one on imposter syndrome; and if nothing seems worth doing, the one on lack of motivation. If the way you see yourself is harsh overall, see also signs of low self-esteem and how to build self-esteem.

A mindset is a belief about whether ability can change, so it is a different concept from personality traits such as extraversion or conscientiousness. If you are curious about your own traits, the Big Five personality test shows five traits as scores.

Q. Has the growth mindset been shown to work? A. On average, mindset is only weakly linked to grades (r = .10; Sisk et al., 2018). In the US national experiment, a short online programme raised the grades of students at or below their school’s median by 0.10 points (Yeager et al., 2019), but of the 2023 meta-analyses, one found no significant effect in the highest-quality studies (Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023a), while the other found an effect of d = 0.14 on academic achievement for the intended groups when the intervention was delivered faithfully, but a wide range of effects to be expected in future studies, −0.08 to 0.35 (from the abstract; Burnette et al., 2023).

Q. Is a fixed mindset bad? A. Dweck wrote that everyone is a mixture of both mindsets and probably always will be, and that “banning” the fixed mindset only creates false growth mindsets (Dweck, 2015). Mindsets lie on a continuum and can shift over time (Yeager & Dweck, 2020).

Q. Should I just praise my child’s effort? A. Dweck herself named praising effort when a child is not learning as a common misunderstanding (Dweck, 2015). The 1998 study comparing praise for intelligence with praise for effort was mostly not replicated in a 2019 replication attempt, a reading that is itself disputed (Li & Bates, 2019; Yeager & Dweck, 2020).

Q. Does it work for adults? A. In the 2018 meta-analysis, the correlation between mindset and achievement in adults was r = .02 and not significant, and the effect of interventions for adults (d = 0.08) was not significant either (Sisk et al., 2018). Most of the research is on students.

Q. Is it the same as grit? A. No. A growth mindset is the belief that ability can be developed (Yeager & Dweck, 2020), while grit refers to perseverance and passion for long-term goals. The research on grit is covered in the grit guide, and how grit differs from resilience in the resilience guide.

Q. Every time I fail I think “I’m just someone who can’t”, and it hurts so much I want to disappear. A. Please do not carry this alone. Reach out to a crisis line right away: call or text 988 in the US and Canada, call Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, or find a line at findahelpline.com elsewhere. If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services. If low mood goes on for a long time, see also the guide on depression symptoms.

References: Sisk, V. F., Burgoyne, A. P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L., & Macnamara, B. N. (2018), To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses, Psychological Science 29(4), 549-571, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617739704; Dweck, C. S., & Leggett, E. L. (1988), A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality, Psychological Review 95(2), 256-273, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.95.2.256; Dweck, C. S., Chiu, C., & Hong, Y. (1995), Implicit theories and their role in judgments and reactions: a word from two perspectives, Psychological Inquiry 6(4), 267-285, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli0604_1; Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S. (2020), What can be learned from growth mindset controversies?, American Psychologist 75(9), 1269-1284, https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000794; Dweck, C. S. (2015), Carol Dweck revisits the “growth mindset”, Education Week, https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-carol-dweck-revisits-the-growth-mindset/2015/09; OECD (2019), PISA 2018 Results (Volume III): What School Life Means for Students’ Lives, chapter 14 “Growth mindset”, OECD Publishing, https://doi.org/10.1787/acd78851-en; Li, Y., & Bates, T. C. (2019), You can’t change your basic ability, but you work at things, and that’s how we get hard things done: testing the role of growth mindset on response to setbacks, educational attainment, and cognitive ability, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 148(9), 1640-1655, https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000669; Yeager, D. S., Hanselman, P., Walton, G. M., et al. (2019), A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement, Nature 573(7774), 364-369, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1466-y; Yeager, D. S., Carroll, J. M., Buontempo, J., et al. (2022), Teacher mindsets help explain where a growth-mindset intervention does and doesn’t work, Psychological Science 33(1), 18-32, https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211028984; Rege, M., Hanselman, P., Solli, I. F., et al. (2021), How can we inspire nations of learners? An investigation of growth mindset and challenge-seeking in two countries, American Psychologist 76(5), 755-767, https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000647; Macnamara, B. N., & Burgoyne, A. P. (2023a), Do growth mindset interventions impact students’ academic achievement? A systematic review and meta-analysis with recommendations for best practices, Psychological Bulletin 149(3-4), 133-173, https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000352; Burnette, J. L., Billingsley, J., Banks, G. C., Knouse, L. E., Hoyt, C. L., Pollack, J. M., & Simon, S. (2023), A systematic review and meta-analysis of growth mindset interventions: for whom, how, and why might such interventions work?, Psychological Bulletin 149(3-4), 174-205, https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000368; Tipton, E., Bryan, C., Murray, J., McDaniel, M. A., Schneider, B., & Yeager, D. S. (2023), Why meta-analyses of growth mindset and other interventions should follow best practices for examining heterogeneity: commentary on Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023) and Burnette et al. (2023), Psychological Bulletin 149(3-4), 229-241, https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000384; Macnamara, B. N., & Burgoyne, A. P. (2023b), A spotlight on bias in the growth mindset intervention literature: a reply to commentaries that contextualize the discussion (Oyserman, 2023; Yan & Schuetze, 2023) and illustrate the conclusion (Tipton et al., 2023), Psychological Bulletin 149(3-4), 242-258, https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000394; Mueller, C. M., & Dweck, C. S. (1998), Praise for intelligence can undermine children’s motivation and performance, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75(1), 33-52, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.33