A large part of our approach rests on Stanford University Professor Carol Dweck’s research into how our attitude to learning has a profound effect on how much we can learn. Made famous recently in her bestselling book Mindset, I recommend it to you as valuable well beyond education. Dweck takes issue with the usefulness of the idea of innate talent. Of course the nature/nurture debate is hardly a new one, but Dweck revisits it from a striking experimental perspective.
Dweck took 150 school children and divided them into two groups of equal ability. Both groups were given introductory sessions – one was told that intelligence is fixed and cannot be changed; that you are either smart or not – they were given a fixed mindset. The other group was told that intelligence is malleable and that they can get smarter with practice; they were given a growth mindset.
The students were then given eight easy problems that they could all do, and then four further ones which were far too hard for the age group, and which no-one expected them to solve, and observed. So what happened? The groups behaved similarly on the easy problems, but when they started on the hard problems, the fixed mindset students behaved very differently to the growth mindset students. Perhaps the most striking thing about the fixed-mindset group was how quickly they began to be negative about their abilities, saying things like ‘I guess I am not very smart’, ‘I never did have a good memory’ and ‘I’m no good at things like this’. Handicapped by the belief that there was nothing they could do about to increase their capacity to solve these problems, they began to struggle and began to give up.
But the growth mindset students, who thought that they could get smarter, were not handicapped in the same way. They did not blame anything. They didn’t focus on reasons for the failures. In fact, they didn’t even consider themselves to be failing. And they performed very differently. More than 80% of them maintained or improved the quality of their strategies during the difficult problems. They taught themselves new and more sophisticated strategies. Some even solved the problems that were supposed to beyond them!
This is not merely surprising; it is extraordinary. Just to reiterate: this difference in performance had nothing to do intelligence. The difference is simply about our beliefs about our own potential, and it calls into question the long-held view that the key to excellence is innate talent. This belief does not necessarily discount hard work, but holds that the bottom line is ability – and if you don’t have the ability, you are never going to achieve excellence. It is the notion that high-level performers are born that way – just smart.
So the evidence is that this point of view is mistaken. As well as the experiment here, dozens of other studies have found that high flyers across all disciplines learn no faster than those who reach lower levels of attainment – hour after hour, they improve at almost identical rates. That is a remarkable finding. High achievers do not, in general, learn faster than others; the difference is simply that high achievers practice for more hours. Interestingly, this is as true for athletic and creative endeavours as it is for academic ones, as shown in Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers and Matthew Syed’s Bounce; the evidence suggests shows that the ‘geniuses’ we all revere only display their genius after several thousand hours of practice.
So the message for students, and perhaps also for us in our professional and personal lives, is that what we believe about our identity is crucial. If we see ourselves as born with certain abilities and talents, and this is fixed, then that will hinder us. It is simply not true that our abilities and talents are fixed. So we need to encourage our students, your children to dream big, work hard, and pursue their passions with all the energy they can.
