Carol Dweck, David Yeager, & Mary Murphy on Science of Human Motivation

Hello, I'm Ron Reed, founder and executive producer for south by Southwest Edu. Thanks so much for joining us for our first virtual program, the Science of Human Motivation, for the next decade. For all of us, the COVID 19 pandemic has created challenges and a new way forward that none of us anticipated. But even through these incredibly trying times, a bright spot for us at south by Southwest, Eduardo has been a powerful and inspirational way the education community has supported one another. As a reflection of our respect for the important work that you, the south by Edu community, do every day, we're pleased to provide this virtual experience. While nothing will replace the magic of our physically being together, we're excited to stay digitally connected and support one another virtually through south by Southwest Edu Online. It's pleasing and fitting, I think, that our first online session occurs during Teacher Appreciation Week. Our warm wishes and best regards go out to all of our education friends. We want you to know that you're our heroes, not only this week, but every week.

Thank you.

Today, it's our pleasure to bring you insights from Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford, Mary Murphy, professor for psychological and Brain sciences at Indiana University. David Yeager, associate professor of psychology from my alma mater, right down the road here in Austin, the University of Texas. In the past decade, scientists have shown that people's mindsets, the way they think about themselves and their place in the world, can shape their motivation and enhance their learning. Over the next decade, we'll see that this knowledge affects changes in teaching and learning context and helps reduce achievement disparities at scale in the context of what this incredible collection of speakers has achieved. Exploring growth mindsets, their talk today will highlight grand challenges for the future and how scientists and practitioners can work together to solve them. Thanks again so much for being here. We appreciate it. And without any further ado, let me turn it over to our friend, David Yeager. David, take it away.

All right. Thanks, Reid. Thanks to south by Southwest, the world leader in canceling major events due to COVID 19. You guys were ahead of the curve. Your swift action really woke up Central Texas to the severity of the crisis, and it also prevented an untold number of scooter accidents on 6th Street. So thanks for action. Thanks to all of you for joining. Thanks to all the teachers out there. Thanks for bearing with us. A lot of this is new to us, too. For instance, this is the first time addressing an audience almost entirely made up of people in their sweatpants. So thanks for joining us wherever you are. Now, let's get started. I'm David Yeager, and although now I'm a professor at UT Austin, I used to be a middle school teacher. And like many teachers, I struggled with that job. And when I discovered Carol Dweck's mindset research, it was a revelation. Here was a way to understand my students, to see the world through their eyes, to find new ways to reach them. Even so, as a teacher, you never want to assume that a problem lies only in the mind of a child. It's also the environment. And Mary Murphy has been showing the importance of mindset culture over the last few years. Mary is the bridge between mindset research and stereotype threat research, one of the most important lines of work on educational inequality. They are presenting their huge bodies of work together for the first time today to you, the south by Southwest audience, and I can't wait to see it. So Carol, take it away.

It's a great pleasure and even an honor to be with all you educators, especially during Teacher Appreciation Week. So here we go. Many years ago, I was gripped, powerfully gripped by a question. And here was that question. Why do some students fear challenges and fall apart when they hit setbacks? But others cope Well. I soon found out that some do more than cope with difficulty. They rank relish it. One unforgettable 10 year old in our study, struggling with problems he couldn't solve, didn't moan and groan. He rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips and said, I love a challenge. There were others like him. These kids became my superheroes then and there. I made a vow to learn their secret, to bottle it and to distribute it widely. And by the way, to take a few healthy swigs myself. Now why was this question important? First, a dramatic change comes over many children in early life. Here's an infant who just turned on a computer for the first time. Look at that. Joy in challenge, learning, accomplishment. But just a few years later, we start to see this. And this. And if we check in a few years after that, when kids are in high school and starting to make life changing academic decisions, what do we see? Do our students want challenges? No. In a large US study, we found that most of the entering high school students, 2/3 of them, wanted easy math problems that taught them nothing over hard ones they can learn, learn from. Are our students prepared for the Future? No. The OECD is an international organization that every three years gives surveys and the PISA achievement tests to 15 year olds around the world. Here's what they recently found. In the US 85% of our 15 year olds are hope to enter highly skilled professions. Well, that sounds good. But only 17% of them performed at the highest level of proficiency in any of the three subjects tested. Reading, math and science. Should we be worried? Yes. Okay, we're worried. But now what? What can we do? In our research, we've shown that students mindsets about their academic talents and abilities can help students can play a role in helping them embrace challenge and relish difficulty. What are these mindsets? When students are in more of a fixed mindset, they believe their talents and abilities are just fixed. They have a certain amount, that's it. Nothing you can do about it. But when students are in more of a growth mindset, they believe that the talents and abilities can be developed, say through hard work, good strategies, lots of help, and mentoring from others. What do these mindsets do? Studies show they create different psychological worlds for students. In a fixed mindset world, their goals are to look smart, never look dumb, don't take on a difficult goal. You can fail and discredit your abilities. In a growth mindset, you want those challenging goals because they help you learn, even if you make mistakes and don't look so smart at first. What about effort? In a fixed mindset, effort is negative. If you need high effort, it means you don't have high ability. Look, if you had high ability, you wouldn't need all that effort. But in a growth mindset, effort is a route toward learning and growth, like strategies and help from others. What about setbacks? In a fixed mindset, they are the ultimate negative. They call your abilities into question and you want to just get out of there. But in a growth mindset, they're a natural part of learning. You can capitalize on them to advance your learning and understanding so you work harder and smarter. Let's take a little peek inside the brain to see how this works. The brain on the right represents students in a growth mindset who just made a mistake. Their brain is in the learning from errors mode and it's all lit up. That means they're processing the error deeply. And by the way, they're more likely to correct it at the next opportunity. The brain on the left, the fixed mindset students. They detected the error, but they quickly turned their attention elsewhere. And no surprise, they were less likely to learn. So we're starting to see how a growth mindset can lead students to embrace the very challenge and difficulty that are so essential for learning. What else tells us mindsets have a role to play? In all of these studies here, students mindsets were measured and in each case they were meaningful predictors of their academic outcomes such as grades and test scores. In fact, in this OECD study with over half a million students around the world, a growth mindset was associated with higher reading achievement scores in all but two of the 70 plus countries that were included in their study. Now remember at the beginning I said I wanted to bottle that eagerness that those remarkable kids had and I wanted to give it to students who didn't have it. So can we in fact change students mindset? And by doing that, can we change their desire for challenge? Can we influence their achievement? These initial smaller scale interventions we call them said yes we could. But these studies were not only relatively small, they also required a high level of funding. In the study by Blackwell, we hired and intensively trained a whole staff that went out to the schools and delivered eight sessions over eight weeks. But you'll remember I also wanted to distribute that elixir widely. How could we ever do that with such a costly, labor intensive process? In 2015, our very own David Yeager had a wacky, maybe even foolhardy, but definitely visionary idea. Could we distill the eight session message into two sessions? Could we send it out over the Internet to a nationally representative sample of over 12,000 high school freshmen who would then self administer in the computer lab? And was there even a remote chance that this could meaningfully affect students grades and course taking? Now we worked on this program for two years developing it and testing it. So I want to tell you a little bit about it. We're working with adolescents. They don't take well to. You need our help and we're the experts. First, we made them our collaborators in developing the program. We needed their help. And then later on we also made them benefactors toward others through writing exercises. We asked them to use their growth mindset to mentor a struggling student. We asked them also to consider how they could use their own growth mindset to make their own contributions in their lives. So what happened? Yes, indeed, the mindset program did lead to a meaningful improvement in students grade point averages over that year. And that was for the students who were lower achieving initially. It also resulted in greater enrollment in advanced math courses one year later. And that applied to students at all achievement levels. But where didn't the program work? Now you have to understand something. Researchers don't usually seek out places where their studies won't work. But we did, because you learn a lot from where it doesn't work. And we in fact learned a lot. Now after a program like ours, when students go back into their classrooms with their new or fortified grudges mindset, they ask themselves, is this a place where I can put it into practice? Will my teacher be pleased? Will she support my new efforts or not? Here's what we found. When teachers themselves had a growth mindset and the students took their new growth mindsets into that classroom, it fizzled out. Only when the teacher had a growth mindset did that student's mindset take root, flourish, and turn into higher grades. I'm going to actually stay there. What we don't know yet and we desperately want to know. Emphasis on desperately. What are the more fixed mindset teachers doing to neutralize the growth mindset effects? What are the growth mindset teachers doing to support those effects? Things that we would like more teachers to do. And the jackpot question, what would it take to create full growth mindset cultures in the future? We call our quest for these answers our new Mount Everest. Because it's really hard, it's a really long term goal and it will take a large team of researchers and practitioners to accomplish. But we are fully committed because we believe that the power of growth mindset cannot be known, cannot be fulfilled until we know how to create cultures that instill a growth mindset and sustain it. We know there has never been a more important time to figure this out. With so many students falling behind and so many modern jobs requiring more mathematical, scientific and technical skills, we believe that every student deserves to dream about those high level jobs, those highly skilled professions. And we believe that they need to be guided along a path that will get them there. Thank you and we hope you'll be joining us on this journey. I'd like to turn the floor over now to Mary Murphy, who will share her groundbreaking work with us on teacher mindsets and classroom cultures. Mary?

Thank you, Carol. While I get this up, I just want to give a heartfelt thank you to all of the teachers out there. I have been so blown away and inspired by the resilience and flexibility and passion you have shown in the midst of this massive disruption in education, across all grades, across all of our experience, and across the world. I want to just say thank you to the teachers. I come from a long line of educators, myself, my mom, my grandparents, now, my cousin, my aunt. So I want to say that we see you and we value you and we are so grateful for you. So I'm going to talk about growth mindset cultures in education and before I get started here, I just want to be really clear about what I mean when I'm Talking about mindset culture. Culture. So in addition to thinking about mindset as sort of a psychological belief inside students heads, we also have to consider the mindsets of those who set up those students learning environments. So when I'm talking about mindset culture, I'm talking about the beliefs of powerful people in a setting, what I like to call the culture creators of those settings. People like teachers and professors in classroom settings, supervisors and bosses in workplace settings. What do these powerful people believe about our talent and ability? Do they believe that these talents and abilities are stable traits that can't be changed very much? Or do they believe more often that talent and ability is a potential that can be developed through hard work, strategies and a lot of mentoring and help seeking at the right moments. What I'm arguing here is that mindset culture is truly a cultural variable. It's expressed through what faculty say and do, what our norms are, our policies, our practices, and in our interactions with students. So of course we want to understand how might these processes, how might these processes play out? How do professors mindsets actually influence students experiences and performance? Well, there are at least a couple of ways this might happen. First, we might think that these mindsets of faculty members might affect all students engagement and performance. Based on the 20 years of research we've seen, when students themselves have a growth mindset, they're more likely to become engaged and to perform well in learning environments. So with that basis, perhaps faculty mindsets might trigger engagement and performance for all students. A second possibility that's complementary to that is, is that perhaps these professors mindsets might have an even stronger effect for students who belong to groups that are negatively stereotyped regarding their intelligence and abilities. So in American society, these are black and Latinx and Native American students, as well as first gen low income students and women in stem. Why might this be? Why might we get stronger effects for these students who contend with these negative cultural stereotypes that are in and remain in our society today? Well, it's because these stereotypes continue to impugn the competence and intellectual abilities of these groups of students. So if we think about this from the student perspective, I as a student have a professor who I think endorses these fixed mindset beliefs. They think, for example, that STEM abilities like computational ability or spatial rotation, these are qualities that are relatively fixed. You're either good at them or, or you're not. You have it or you don't. But again, from a student's perspective, if I think my teacher believes this, that some students have it and some students don't what does the culture tell us about who those students are that are likely to have it? If I think my professor endorses these beliefs, I might also think my professor then expects, for example, the positively stereotyped students, White and Asian students, to have more ability than Black, Latinx, Native students and women in stem. However, if I perceive that my professor instead endorses a growth mindset about these STEM abilities, that they're malleable, they're things that we can improve with effort and learning, then the inference becomes that that professor believes that all students, as long as they engage in those growth mindset strategies of effort, learning and mentoring, that we could all put in the effort and adopt the strategies that that would then lead to success regardless of our identity background. So what I'm arguing here is that perceiving that a STEM professor endorses these fixed mindset beliefs can create a context of stereotype threat, putting students from these groups at risk of confirming negative cultural stereotypes about their group. Now, how would we know that these faculty mindsets might be creating a context of stereotype threat? We should expect to see the same kind of effects that we see in the stereotype threat literature, such that underrepresented racial and ethnic minority students might underperform relative to their white and Asian counterparts, but only and more so in the context of those fixed faculty mindsets and not in the context of the growth faculty mindsets. My colleagues and I conducted an institution wide faculty mindset study to test this very question. We invited the entire faculty at an institution, 150 STEM faculty, to self report their fixed and growth mindset beliefs. Then we collected longitudinal data over seven semesters. These 150 faculty taught over 600 courses and reached over 15,000 college students. And we were really interested in how those faculty mindset beliefs might actually affect the performance of students in their class. So in line with the first possibility I mentioned earlier, we did see evidence that students actually perform worse in classes that are taught by faculty who self report more fixed mindset beliefs here on the left relative to the right when faculty report more growth mindset beliefs. But also in line with the second possibility, we found that the racialized achievement gap is twice as large in courses taught by faculty who self report more fixed mindset beliefs. Now, if you've been working in STEM context as long as I have, you know that this unfortunately is a highly replicable pattern. We see these kinds of racialized achievement gaps in many STEM contexts. So what I was particularly surprised by and interested in following up on was the data from this perspective here we see this racialized achievement gap is actually cut in half when faculty who have more of a growth mindset are teaching these courses. So of course we want to know what are faculty saying and doing there, what are they actually communicating and how are their practices different that they're able to narrow these gaps. And we want to understand this from the student's perspective. What is it like to be a student in these fixed and growth mindset classes? We were able to gather course evaluations for all 600 of those courses. And there we were able to discover that the growth mindset instructors were doing things differently. Growth mindset instructors motivated students more to do their best work. They were more likely in the course of their everyday teaching to emphasize and show students their learning and development. The students of course, were more likely to recommend these courses taught by those particular growth mindset instructors. But the place where we didn't see any differences, interestingly, was in students perceptions about how much time these courses took or how rigorous they perceived them. So what we found is that growth mindset instructors emphasize learning and development more to their students. They motivate students to do their best work. And yet these fixed and growth mindset classes are equally time intensive, rigorous. In another study, we wanted to get a more granular look to really understand how students in the moment are experiencing their faculty members mindsets. How do these mindsets influence students experiences within their actual college courses in the moment that they're in the courses? To do this, we examined and conducted an experience sampling study in STEM college classrooms. We invited over 1000 first and second year college students enrolled in many different STEM courses at four different universities. And what we did in this study was we asked these students to report their perceptions of what they thought their faculty members mindset beliefs were. We then pinged them on their cell phones after every single class for two weeks. With these experience sampling surveys where we asked students to report there are psychological vulnerability in the moment in those classes. We ended up gathering over 7,000 surveys. And let's see what we found here. These are the process model results. What we find is that perceiving one STEM professor to endorse more fixed mindset beliefs increases students psychological vulnerability in that particular professor's class. It lowers their sense of belonging. It increases their evaluative concerns. It makes them feel like more of an imposter in the classroom and and it increases their negative affect. In turn, this lowers course of engagement. It also lowers their STEM interest. Their interest not just in this particular class, but also in the field of study that that particular professor teaches, it also lowers course performance across these different contexts. So what are teachers actually saying and doing that communicate their mindset beliefs to students? This is really our new Mount Everest. And in order to begin exploring answers to this question, my students and I conducted a study to learn how students would categorize the verbal and nonverbal messages that might be likely to communicate faculty mindset beliefs in class. Using what's called some mouse tracking software that looks at how our computer mouse might categorize these various cues, we asked students to categorize 119 professor behaviors and statements as either growth minded or fixed minded. So if you were in this study, for example, you thought you saw professor offers additional practice problems and you categorized it in this way as growth minded, it would suggest to us that those students saw this cue as relatively easy to categorize. There's little uncertainty here. Here's a little bit more uncertainty if a different student had more difficulty categorizing this. And here's a lot of uncertainty right Where a student might not really be sure if this is fixed or growth minded, but ultimately decide it's growth mind. So even though our results allowed for this level of sort of uncertainty and ambiguity, we nonetheless found there was very strong agreement between students and between our pre registered predictions about which cues actually do signal more fixed or more growth mindset on the part of the teachers. So let's look at what some of these cues are. The cues that were categorized as very growth minded were those like this. The professor tries different ways of explaining the material to ensure that all students understand it. They encourage students to be in touch so they can improve their understanding of the material. And when faculty characterize mistakes as opportunities to learn, that also signals growth mindset on the part of the instructor. Let's look at some cues that actually signal more fixed mindset beliefs. When the professor encourages struggling students to drop the class when they say that all students may not be capable of doing well, when they don't believe extra time is really going to help students very much in the class, or when they say to struggling students, it's okay, you're just not a math person, right? These are all cues that are signaling to students that their faculty member or instructor endorses more of these cues fixed mindset beliefs. So the takeaways from these studies was that messages that prioritize grades and suggest that ability is natural and static seem to convey to students that this is a fixed mindset teacher. Whereas messages that prioritize student learning and suggest intellectual ability can improve. This suggests to students that this is a growth mindset teacher. What we also found was that when professors were able to provide their reasons for why they said or did certain things in class, this also helped students grasp the mindset culture of that environment. But there's so much more to learn about how we can create these growth mindset cultures in our classroom. What we know are that there are certain predictable situations here in our learning environments that are more likely to trigger students into a fixed or growth mindset. And so a question for future research is how can teachers, staff and administrators structure these learning environments so they call forward the growth mindset more of the time? Now, for the past three summers, my colleagues and I have been conducting a summer teacher institute with kindergarten through sixth grade teachers to really understand this very question. Can teachers help us identify how to create these sustainable growth mindset cultures in their K through 6 classrooms? What we do at this institute are several things. First, we teach kindergarten through sixth grade teachers about growth mindset and theories of cultural inclusion. And then we offer some initial ideas for some culturally inclusive growth mindset strategies for changing their classroom culture. And then teachers draw on their own experience to help them authentically develop practices that are sustainable for them to create these culturally inclusive growth mindset cultures. In this institute, teachers are deeply involved in co creating these experiences and practices that they feel they can sustainably use throughout the year. For example, we see some of the innovations coming out of this institute such that a lot of teachers focus on their community agreements given how essential they are to structuring the norms, expectations, and interactions in kindergarten through sixth grade classes. Teachers redesign their classroom agreements through the lens of growth mindset so you can see that they pledge to grow their brain six hours a day, make mistakes and grow from them, and recognize and celebrate growth in each other and themselves. In another example, teachers work to understand the ways that students mindset triggers show up in the classroom in ways like I can't do this and they brainstorm and practice different responses to help students shift more often towards the growth mindset instead of the fixed mindset in class. Another challenge is the college setting. Can we learn with college faculty how to create psychologically safe growth mindset cultures in their classrooms? The College Transition Collaborative is a research practice partnership that David, Greg Walton, Christine Local and I co founded to support students to and through their college journey. And in our Student Experience Project, we're working with several learning partners to test this question. In particular, faculty, administrators and staff at six different universities around the country have Been identifying areas for faculty and institutional change where growth mindset could be infused in these practices and implemented at scale. We're evaluating the impact of this institutional change with all kinds of methods, including experience sampling in the classrooms, as well as looking at students grades and course taking. From this work and others, the CTC will offer scalable tools to help college faculty create more psychologically safe growth mindset cultures in their classrooms. So taken together, these growth mindset cultures communicate that intelligence and ability is something that can be developed and expanded. And what we've learned over the last few years is that instructors who communicate a growth mindset about ability increase their students motivation and engagement, reduce their psychological vulnerability, that increases their belonging and their performance, and creates more equitable learning environments. And so, as we think about the next decade of motivation science, we know that mindset culture has to be part of our new Mount Everest. We need to understand much more about what faculty are saying and doing that communicate their mindset to students. We want to know whether faculty can engage in these practices sustainably and with fidelity. And do faculty beliefs need to change or is it enough simply to change their behavior? And finally, how do faculty and student mindsets interact with each other to shape students motivation and performance? But of course, we can't do this alone. We need community to do it together. And we hope you will join us as we move into the next decade of motivation research and science. Next, I'm going to turn it over to David, who's going to tell us a bit more about where we are going to go from here.

Great.

And I've been monitoring the questions on Slido. They're incredible. Mary, you just answered one of Drew Gooden's questions. How can school structure start being optimized to promote a growth mindset? We're going to dig into that more. Carol, while I'm getting set up, here's a question for you. A lot of people are asking, is it true that mindsets can exist in different ways and in the same person? So there's a question about a fixed mindset about art, but maybe not math or social and emotional experiences versus academic. You want to take a shot at those while I'm getting set up?

Absolutely. People can absolutely have different mindsets in different areas. In fact, they're not highly correlated. You can have a growth mindset about intellectual abilities, a fixed mindset about athletic or artistic abilities. So that teaches us a lesson that we can't just teach a growth mindset in one domain and expect it to generalize all over. We have to help students see that it's true in many domains.

Great. We can return to that, too. And my talk, a little preview, is going to address some of these great questions coming up, like what are the common mistakes that teachers might make when attempting to nurture a growth mindset? What's the future of online learning going to look like? Let's get started. I'm David Yeager, as you know, and I want to imagine with you today how we can go from the important insights that Carol and Mary just shared to a world in which real policy problems can be changed at scale in collaboration with educators across the country and across the world. As Carol mentioned, the National Study of Learning Mindsets found that a growth mindset intervention lasting under an hour could improve adolescents academic behavior and their grades across the U.S. but there were no benefits when teachers had more of a fixed mindset and rather striking benefits when students had more of a growth mindset. Which you can see at the top of the graph, is that point two grade points or standard deviations is usually about the largest effect that you can expect from a high quality evaluation of even massive and costly interventions like dramatically reducing class sizes or a year with a high quality teacher. Point two is an entire year of learning in math. And growth mindset is getting almost three quarters of that across the US With a short, free intervention in the most rigorous kind of experiment that we could imagine, provided that the teacher had more of a growth mindset in this analysis. And that leads to the tantalizing and exciting prospect of important effects. If we could figure out how to make more teachers look like the teachers on the right and not like the teachers on the left. It doesn't sound like it should be that hard. We have mindset interventions, after all. Why not just give them to teachers? But it's not quite as simple. And in fact, experts in education know that one of the single hardest things to do in our field is to reliably change instructional practices in the diverse schools that make up American education. And why is that? Well, as you know, I was a middle school teacher once, and I remember what it was like. You're standing in front of 30 teenagers in your classroom. It's a fragile state of equilibrium that's kind of in danger of being knocked out of whack. Your assessments, your lessons, your language, your relationships with your students and with their parents and with your administrator, right? They all form a complex web. And if you start changing one thing, it could mess up lots of other things. So as a teacher, we're often reluctant to change Too much. But as teachers, we're constantly asked to change. We're bombarded with new programs and practices from the principal or the district. It's hard to know which new initiative is useful and which one is going to be a fad. So many teachers reasonably wait to change until after fads have sorted themselves out. That's why, to many experts in the field, one of the hardest things to do in reform is to take aim at classroom culture. It's why people have so often looked for quick and simple fixes, like a nudge here or education technology there. And it's why, after decades of randomized trials, millions of dollars spent on professional development, the most likely finding in a study that evaluates an intervention or program for teachers is a null effect with no benefits. So we looked up the mountain, the three of us and others we work with, and we saw this huge, seemingly unsurmountable challenge. And we also saw the tantalizing possibilities even more. We saw that the full potential of growth mindset would not be seen unless we learn how to change classroom cultures. And eventually we said, what if we could instead define the ascent up this mountain as the single greatest challenge that our field needs to face in the next few years? Right? So, like, how can we. How can we invite experts in many fields to creatively work together on this next generation of puzzles? What if we could form new kinds of partnerships with practice organizations? We started scoping out the problem and peering up this mountain and realized we kind of see a path here. We don't have to start from scratch. And here's a preview. So first we propose a progression that goes from initially reducing the most extreme fixed mindset practices, the kinds of practices that Mary in her work was just telling us about. Next, reducing what's called false growth mindset practices. These are the sorts of things that we tell ourselves our growth mindset, but don't actually require us to make meaningful changes. Then later identifying specific high leverage practices targeted to moments of students vulnerability, practices that may not require a teacher to change everything, but that, when adopted the right way, can have a big impact. So the most complicated of all, which is helping to architect entire growth mindset cultures. So one place to start where we think there's real traction is teacher language. Language is a window into a teacher's mindset. For instance, students may infer that their teachers have a fixed mindset when they hear, I'm sorry that it's hard for you. Maybe you're just not a math person. We need to identify fixed mindset language and help teachers to reduce it. But even if we could reduce fixed mindset language, we'd have another challenge, which is what we've called false growth mindset language. Growth mindset seems like a really simple idea, and it is once you get it. But it's also easy to mistake it for other simple ideas that are common in our culture. In particular, people think a growth mindset just means telling students to try hard or stay positive. It could even be a way to blame students who aren't doing well. Why don't you have a growth mindset right? And you can see this if you just Google image search growth mindset posters after scrolling through several pages of cat memes, then you see posters like this, right? Here's a poster that exhorts students to effort but doesn't teach kids how to grow right. It doesn't appreciate that the fixed mindset makes students think effort is a bad thing that reveals your inability. True growth mindset undoes those negative effort beliefs. This sign on the right tells students to be positive, but doesn't give them a reason why they should be hopeful or how to even create a hopeful future. It doesn't tell them the growth mindset message that your abilities can improve. And so we need to reduce false growth mindset so the research doesn't lose credibility. Then we need to identify high leverage practices. One potential candidate Mary alluded to is the way we give critical feedback, right? Imagine a student in a seventh grade class that this is the feedback they get on an essay they stayed up all night working on, maybe desperate for the teacher's approval. In a fixed mindset classroom, the student may think, this teacher looks down on me and my ability. That's why they're criticizing my work. But a high leverage practice is to find ways to clarify to students that we believe they can grow and develop even as we're critiquing them. Jeff Cohen of Stanford University and Valerie Purdy Greenaway of Columbia University and I and several others did a study where we had teachers attach handwritten notes with mindset supportive language to students first draft essays. The notes were what Jeff Cohen has called wise feedback. Specifically, teachers wrote, I'm giving you these comments because I have high standards and I know that you can meet them. There are two key parts here. The first is the high standard. It implies I'm not biased, I'm just holding you to a rigorous standard. But the second is critical. It's the assurance. It implies, I wouldn't do this or say this if I didn't think that you could learn and meet that higher standard I just mentioned. This kind of feedback can be especially important for students of color. In a white teacher's classroom. For example, a student who may be wondering if stereotypes about their ability are going to lead to this teacher's feedback. We conducted a double blind randomized experiment in real seventh grade classrooms. Students got the high standards and assurance note handwritten by a teacher or a control note that conveyed no new information. What did we find? We looked at the percentage who revised their essays a week later and a control group. There was a striking engagement gap between white students and African American students when students got the high standards and assurance note. Yes, there was an increase among white students from 62% to 87%, but there's a really striking increase among African American students from 17% to 72%. That's a 77% reduction in the engagement gap for this assignment. In this one early experiment, growth mindset supportive practices were good overall for everyone, but they were especially good for students who faced negative stereotypes about their intelligence, just as Mary has shown you. Of course, this is just one demonstration. Reducing achievement gaps is not so easy as handing out a post it note. But we need to identify more high leverage practices that can make the growth mindset come alive. And then we could do studies like this where we revise the types of messages teachers write and look at the effect of those mindset practices. Now imagine an entire growth mindset culture, one where students get wise feedback and practices like it for an entire year. We need to learn more about how to create this, and one place we're looking is at the instruction of exemplary educators. One of my favorite examples is Uri Treisman, who incidentally is asking lots of questions in the slido today, who I think is the best calculus professor here at the University of Texas. It was described in Paul Tuft's fascinating and excellent book, the Years that Matter How College Makes or Breaks Us. Treisman routinely has strong outcomes for students from underserved groups, and his students compare well with Harvard and MIT students who take the same tests. In fact, he's responsible for enormous numbers of students of color staying in math and engineering pathways. So how does he do it? Well, here's an example of his language. This is what he says early on in the class. He says, everyone in this class will struggle. No matter who you are. Questions are going to be flying at you that you can't answer. If you don't understand that struggle is a pathway to learning, you'll think it means, oh no, I don't Belong here. Then he goes on to explain that struggle is a part of the process for learning. It can be an indicator that your understanding is deepening as long as you're continuing to study with others and improve your learning strategies. But Tribesman's class I've learned after visiting it is far more than language. It's the lecturing style that focuses on conceptual understanding that allows students to get it at their own pace. It's the assignments that normalize difficulty for everyone. Grading policies that allow students to recover their grades once they learn from mistakes, norms and routines about inclusion and belonging, cultural identity. It's a web of practices and it's effective. And yet Uri would be one of the first people to say that we have to be mindful of the temptation to identify personalities in education and try to scale them wholesale. We can't necessarily scale exemplars, but we can use Trisman's teaching as an existence proof, and we can use it as a source of ideas for practices that were developed in the crucible of real world instruction. Can we look at not just Uri's practices, but many other instructors like him across the country, across the world, figure out how to break the pieces apart and evaluate them? How can we help teachers take on these practices in ways that are authentic and sustainable? So let's return to the journey ahead. First, let's produce fixed mindset practices. The days of telling half of students that they need to look to their left and look to your right and realize that they're not going to be an engineer or a chemist should be over. We should be finding ways to reduce the most toxic practices in our classrooms. Second, we need to be vigilant for continue to understand false growth mindset. Third, we need to identify additional high leverage practices. Wise critical feedback is just one, there have to be many others. Finally, we need to figure out how to architect growth mindset environments. How can we begin to embed these ideas in a curriculum and assessment and teacher training and rigorously test their benefits? This has never been done. I want to be clear about that. And it kind of feels impossible to make progress. But we find a little bit of reassurance in what some other fields have done, how they've come together to solve daunting collective problems. In physics, for example, when it became clear that many fundamental questions could not be answered, the field didn't decide to simply ask less important questions. They built a large hadron collider and field altering results soon followed. Inspired by this kind of thinking, we're trying to do Something similar in education. This is just one example, and we hope that it's an example that many others can do as well. Well, we're calling it our initiative, the Texas Mindset Initiative. Of course, our goal is to scale these ideas as appropriate everywhere eventually. But to get there, we needed to start with a committed group of scholars and practitioners. And why not start in Texas? Texas's demographics are a microcosm of the nations. Our influence on curriculum and curriculum adoption is immense. The data systems here have tremendous promise. Further, Texas has a long history with growth mindset. Some of the first interventions were tested here by Josh Aronson and Katherine Good. And last, Texas is committed to equity. After all, we're the two time undefeated national champions of Supreme Court affirmative action cases. In the Texas Mindset Initiative, we have several research practice partnerships. One is with onramps, which delivers distance education and dual enrollment courses across the state of Texas. It's a rigorous and diverse and equity minded organization and we're co developing interventions with them. A second is the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin where we're partnering with the dean, Paul Goldpart. We're supported in this work by Charles Martinez at the University of Texas College of Education. And we're going to work together with them to identify and test practices that promote equity, inclusion and excellence. Here's the ambitious goal that we want to discipline our work. It'll focus on math and science outcomes during challenging school transitions, the transition to high school and the transition to college. Our goal is to increase student achievement and get larger effects than the mindset studies we've done in the past. We want to reduce group based inequality substantially and we want to promote student well being while doing it so that students take pleasure in their learning and aren't burned out. We seek to do this by developing a scalable program and set of supports for instructors that's available for free. So can we do this? We don't actually know. No initiative has ever met all of these goals at once. But this is the future and this is where we're headed. To sum up, you know, the task ahead is truly monumental. We need your help and we'd love to, you know, start thinking with you and talking with you. People ask, well, what can I do right now? These materials aren't ready yet. Well, one thing you can do is you can start using the vetted growth mindset interventions that we've evaluated and some of the measures, measures of both student mindsets and mindset cultures. We've made these available for free. We're never going to charge for these materials, so we'd love for people to use them. Second, the COVID crisis is making mindset research more relevant than ever. We think students are being asked to be self directed learners in their homes. Their learning mindsets and the motivation they instill are going to be critical, critical for their success. And so creating a feeling of inclusion and belonging at a distance will also be harder and more important than ever. And so as we develop our interventions, we want to be informed by practices that are bubbling up from expert practitioners. And that's why we want to hear from you. We need you to nominate your colleagues for inspirational new practices. Share them on Twitter, reach out to us at at the account listed there. In fact, Carol and I have begun our own little YouTube show where we're interviewing teachers about their practices. And if it looks like we don't know how to create a YouTube show, it's because we don't know how to create a YouTube show. And yet we think important to highlight teachers practices. And last, please just keep doing what you're doing to mitigate the current and increasing inequalities in our educational system. They are being revealed and increased by this crisis. We're all in this together. Thank you very much and I look forward to your questions.

Great job. Great job. David, I am looking at the questions here and I think this first one Carol could probably take a stab at given that I know that you and David have been meeting with teachers as they've transitioned online in the middle of this pandemic. There's two questions that I think are related here. One is since we are now fully online, what are some suggestions for increasing intrinsic motivation and growth mindset in students? And how can we build community among students and educators to climb the new Mount Everest if we're limited to virtual communication? So I know that you have seen some exemplars and ways that teachers have innovated in this moment, so maybe you could talk us about that.

Yes, many of the teachers we talked to were finding real meaning and the students were finding real meaning in virtual office hours. In regular school, students are reluctant to go to office hours. Other students see them seeking help or cozying up to the teacher. But real relationships have been formed that some teachers are saying. Even some of their more disengaged students are now engaged with them and are seeking their help to learn teachers posting their lessons so students can watch them repeatedly and really get it. Even if they didn't get it the first time, the one time that they'd usually see it in a real classroom setting, teachers are giving students more respect and independence to decide when to watch the video of the class, to grade their own work in a guided way through looking at solved problems, to see what they did wrong. All of the things we talked about before honoring adolescents, giving them independence, forming a relationship that they can trust. Teachers who have done this are finding enhanced relationships and in some cases, enhanced learning.

Yeah, and Carol, I just wanted just to add to that, you know, that one teacher, Joel, outside of who's collaborating with us on the Texas Mindset Initiative, talked about new ways to get students that were on the fence, kind of on the engaged side of the fence. Students who might have felt nervous about speaking up about their misunderstandings in front of their friends now feel safer doing it. At the same time, teachers are saying, hey, some of my classes, I'm not seeing 50% of my students. So there, there are real challenges to just having students be engaged. A final thing I think we're learning is that classes that were already set up to be online with all the assignments and the dates were able to kind of take advantage of the crisis and try out new ways of engaging students. But a lot of teachers were scrambling for weeks just getting their stuff online, and it's just so hard to keep your students engaged. Carol, one question is, what are the most common mistakes that teachers and coaches make when attempting to nurture a growth mindset? This is from Ben Resnik. I touched on a little of the false growth mindset, but you want to elaborate a little.

Yeah. The false growth mindset is a major pitfall. Of course, teachers want to simplify growth mindset and fit it in easily. But as you said, just try hard. That's not going to have kids embrace challenges and learning, stay positive. Another one is you can do anything. Now, I hope that's true, but just saying it isn't going to make it. Exactly. You have to show the path, help them on the path, be clear about what skills they'll need to develop, help them obtain those skills. So those are some real pitfalls.

I'll add a little bit here. I think that one of the misconceptions, at least at first, that we discovered in elementary school context was that, you know, we think of these growth mindset classrooms as just like rainbows and unicorns, right? Like, so friendly and kind and warm and sometimes they are. But also they're really rigorous and they're constantly challenging students to go beyond their current level of ability to take on new challenges, to make a lot of mistakes. And many Times students experience this as difficult. Right. And so there is some misconception, misconceptions about how this is going to go. Right. That this may not be as challenging as we anticipate, but what we know is a true growth mindset. Cultures and classrooms are ones that are constantly requiring growth and learning, both on the part of the teacher about how to improve one's abilities to grow and scale and help students understand where they are and where they need to get to, as well as on the part of students who are constantly expected to grow and learn over time.

I agree with that. It's really stereotyped as a feel good classroom and there's a lot of good feeling and joy in learning, but there's a lot of hard work and a lot of critical feedback.

That's right.

So, Carol, I want to double click on something here. This is again a question from Ben Resnik. Does a growth mindset require that you ignore any either innate difference or acquire differences in skill? Right. You know, we've talked about the difference between comparing yourself to someone else versus comparing yourself to yourself in the future or the past. Do you want to speak a little about how. Yeah.

Yes. A common misconception is that growth mindset means everybody is the same right now. And I think this has led to often failing to challenge students who are advanced. You really need to be challenging everyone at the right level. The heart and soul of the growth mindset is the idea that everyone can develop their abilities and you have no, no idea how much any given child can do it with the support and motivation. So that's the underlying assumption that potential is unlimited and unknown, not that everybody is exactly the same.

So we have a question from Sergio Estrada, who is the Uri Triesman of El Paso. The upvoted question here. What are other examples of false growth mindset outside of language? And I want to take a stab at this. I think one thing is talking a big talk about here you can get supported, here you can learn. But not having the structures where students get feedback can remediate their skills. You look in Uri's class, lots of students succeed, but a lot of students need really intensive supports on, for instance, their high school algebra they may not have gotten. So I think a huge false growth mindset thing is unfettered optimism without making the commitment in your practices and your supports of students, because otherwise teenagers will see right through the hypocrisy. They're really good BS detectors. Teenagers are.

Exactly. You can't just define a growth mindset. Put up a chart, and that's that your practices have to embody it and sustain it.

Here's a couple of questions about how we might change our evaluation processes or the reward system in education that tends to reward success more traditionally. There's a question about how college admission counselors, for example, might differentially consider different kinds of characteristics besides GPA and test scores, for example. So what might it look like to encourage a reward growth mindset and its byproducts within this system that traditionally values this sort of performance?

Is that for me?

For anybody? Carol? David?

Well, I kind of like gpa. GPA is an accumulation of lots and lots of choices made over time. I mean, it's a good signal of, you know, working hard. I think the biggest problem we see is when people try to game their GPA by dropping their hard classes, and then society doesn't benefit. We need people who know physics and chemistry and advanced math. And so I think finding ways to align the rewards for students who diligently continue to improve, rather, who can just show up and ace a test and who take chances while also taking hard classes.

Exactly.

Improvement in gpa, I would admit. Someone who arrived at straight A's rather than someone who always got them, perhaps.

I also want to see people consider distance traveled. Some people start at different places, right? Given background in and characteristics that they have no control over. And I think that we have to consider the distance traveled because who do you want? Do you want always the student who never struggled, the effortless performer? Or do you want someone who's really built that muscle over time of figuring out ways to navigate systems and to be able to reach success despite all of these barriers. I want that student in my life.

Academic, not only success or improvement in academics, who has overcome setbacks, challenges, tragedies in their lives to reach a high level of success.

We want people who are going to be learners. The economy of the future is going to need people to go seek out hard to get expertise far before it's obvious that you need that expertise.

And also kids who have thought creatively and originally about problem solving, not just studied hard.

Right. The challenge of using any of these things as admissions criteria is that family privileges allow people to have the freedom to take a risk, right? The flexibility to follow dead ends. So I think any alternative system needs to take an advantage or take account of previous advantages. Carol, there's a bunch of questions that have been asked about adults mindsets. First, how can adults develop a growth mindset? I know you thought about this, Susan Mackey. Another is can you make any headway if the parents have a fixed mindset? You know, don't you change the parents, not just the teachers? You want to address those two questions separately?

Yeah. So first of all, adults can change their mindsets. I'm a case in point. My 6th grade teacher seated us around the room in IQ order, and that put me into a fixed mindset for many, many years. I changed through my own research, through understanding what my life would be like if I didn't take on challenges and what it would be like if I did. Every year I teach Stanford freshmen the first term they get here. Now they're kind of adults, but they are fragile. And yet I try to teach them to think about not how am I doing compared to the person next to me, not worrying every minute, did someone get a higher A than they did? But thinking about what do they want to contribute in their lives and how they can use any resources available to them to become that person who will make their unique contribution. And that is very motivating. How can they develop into that person who will make their contribution? I think many adults can think that way and feel inspired by that idea that they have their own path and they can develop the abilities along that path. Do students, do kids have a chance if their parents have more of a fixed mindset? Then our Mount Everest becomes all the more important that they learn and practice a growth mindset in their classroom culture.

All right, that's a wrap, and thanks a lot.