No Clarity Around Growth Mindset…Yet | Slate Star Codex - 1 views
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(if you’re not familiar with it, growth mindset is the belief that people who believe ability doesn’t matter and only effort determines success are more resilient, skillful, hard-working, perseverant in the face of failure, and better-in-a-bunch-of-other-ways than people who emphasize the importance of ability. Therefore, we can make everyone better off by telling them ability doesn’t matter and only hard work does
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Good research shows that inborn ability (including but not limited to IQ) matters a lot, and that the popular prejudice that people who fail just weren’t trying hard enough is both wrong and harmful.
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A rare point of agreement between hard biodeterminists and hard socialists is that telling kids that they’re failing because they just don’t have the right work ethic is a crappy thing to do. It’s usually false and it will make them feel terrible. Behavioral genetics studies show pretty clearly that at least 50% of success at academics and sports is genetic; various sociologists have put a lot of work into proving that your position in a biased society covers a pretty big portion of the remainder. If somebody who was born with the dice stacked against them works very hard, then they might find themselves at A2 above. To deny this in favor of a “everything is about how hard you work” is to offend the sensibilities of sensible people on the left and right alike
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The point I take from this is that not "everything" is about how hard you work. There are other more important factors to be considered. And these factors mean that not everyone will be a genius in everything. But if you have to learn something (e.g. using ICTs to enhance/transform student learning) then spending the necessary time in an effective way to learn that skill is more likely to help you learn, than simply saying "I can't do it".
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Detailed blog post outlining some reservations and limitation around the research around Dweck's Growth Mindset. An idea used early in this course. Reinforcing the idea to keep a skeptical view of your theories.
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