Program
The Project for Education Research
Audience
researchers
Keywords
Growth Mindset, Intervention, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Developmental Psychology, Social and Personality Psychology
Author(s)
Yeager, D. S. et al.
Date
2018
Abstract
A pressing global challenge is to identify interventions that improve adolescents’ developmental trajectories. But no intervention will work for all young people everywhere. It is critical then to study the heterogeneity of intervention effects in a way that is generalizable and replicable. In the National Study of Learning Mindsets (N = 12,542) researchers randomly assigned 9th grade students in a representative sample of 65 U.S. public schools to a growth mindset intervention, which conveyed that intellectual abilities are not fixed but can be developed. The brief (~50-minute), scalable and low-cost intervention reduced by 3 percentage points the rate at which adolescents in the U.S. were off-track for graduation at the end of the year, corresponding to an
estimated benefit of approximately 100,000 adolescents per year. This is the first experimental evidence that an intervention can improve adolescents’ educational trajectories in a national probability sample. Yet the growth mindset intervention effect was heterogeneous in predictable ways. Some sub-groups of students (lower-achievers) and schools (those with supportive behavioral norms) showed appreciably larger increases in grades. Heterogeneity findings were reproduced in a conservative Bayesian “sum-of-regression-trees” analysis, which guards against false discoveries. These findings lead to novel hypotheses about ways to enhance intervention effects and target public policies. Findings also illustrate the power of even slight
adjustments in motivational priorities to create enduring change during adolescence.