Carol Dweck Brainology

One of the world’s leading researchers in the field of motivation, Carol Dweck, might have come up with the answer to what motivates young minds. “Brainology” suggests that there are two types of mindsets, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. She conducts many tests around the country and comes up with the same results. Having a growth mindset and realizing that intelligence can be developed is better than having a fixed one where a child thinks they are born with intelligence. After reading this paper, you should have a better understanding of Dweck’s research, the different mindsets, and be able to form an opinion on which one you agree with.
Dweck, a professor at Stanford joined forces with her graduate students and they begin to research 7th graders around the nation to see what

motivates them. Dweck states in her article, “we have shown what students believe about their brains whether they see their intelligence as something that’s fixed or something that can grow and change has profound effects on their motivation, learning, and school achievement” (Dweck, p. 1) Dweck is able to use years of research to support her claim. There was profound evidence that students with a growth mindset did better in school, on test, and IQ test.
To start the research, Dweck and her team gave students a test with questions from an IQ test. Then they praised the kids in two different ways, one group praised on their intelligence and the other group was praised on their effort. In her article, Dweck says, “That’s all we did, but the results we dramatic. We did studies like this with children of different ages and ethnicities from around the country, and the results were the same.” (Dweck, p. 3) They quickly saw that the
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children praised on their intelligence did not want to learn, when tasked with something new they chose the easier task, once they were labeled “smart” they did not want to be removed from that list, so they chose something they would likely not make mistakes at. The growth mind set students wanted a task they could learn from.
The team started to notice a lot more than just motivation dwindling in the fixed mind set children, they started losing their confidence as well.

As soon as the questions got harder, the confidence and enjoyment in the student went down. These students could not get out of the “fixed” mindset that they were smart and did not want to come down from that. They also started to lie about the results of their test. The exact opposite happened for the growth mindset kids, they were more eager to learn, showed signs of more confidence, and actually started to score higher on tests than the intelligence praised kids did.
In Dweck’s article she is able to list several examples on how to praise children to give them more of a growth mind set versus a fixed. Examples like, “It was a hard project, but you did it one step at a time and it turned out great!” “I like how you chose the tough problems to solve. You’re really going to stretch yourself and learn new things” (Dweck, p. 3)She was able to test Brainology in 20 New York City schools and not only did the teachers love it but so did the students. The teachers reported that their students became “more active and eager learners” (Dweck, p.

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Growth mindset does not just boost motivation and confidence. It has also shown to narrow the gender gap in math, narrow racial achievement gap, and improves behavior. Other
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researchers, like Lisa Blackwell have continued to test the effects of growth mindsets. Blackwell found that children that received growth mindset training “showed significantly increases in both their math and verbal achievement test scores” It was also noted that the growth set trained girls were able to close the gender gap in math.” (www.mindsetworks,cin/webnav/whatismindset.aspx, 2009)
Dweck and her colleagues put in a lot of time and effort to find out what motivates children. Through many years of research she concluded that there are two different mindsets, growth and fixed. She also determined that growth seems to motivate and fixed doesn’t let children live up to their full potential. There are also many school systems around the country and even the world that have adopted her ideas and implemented them in their school system. In her article she showed examples of children excited to learn again after having growth mindset training. Dweck doesn’t need to argue her point in her article because she is able to show a very sizeable amount of facts and positive results. It would be hard to try to argue against growth mind sets because there is a lot of evidence showing it works.