Zoey Vlake

Professor Oesch-Minor

W131 16832

1/16/2024

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Response to Dweck: The Cause and Effects of a Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck's TED Talk “The Power of Believing You Can Improve” explores the various opportunities that a growth mindset can provide. She also goes into great detail on how to go about promoting a growth mindset within children while providing multiple different examples. When it comes to achieving a growth mindset, the most important part is the process itself. By rewarding the effort instead of the result, people begin to see failure as a challenge to overcome and become more resilient and well-rounded as a whole. (Road map)

(MSS) One example Dweck gave was a thirteen-year-old boy who said, “I put more effort into my schoolwork, into my relationship with my family, and into my relationship with kids at school and I experienced great improvement in all those areas." (Dweck) The boy saw improvements in all the areas that he actively put effort into. Unlike the other statistics provided by Dweck, this specific story shares a glimpse into the process of having a growth mindset, instead of just focusing on the results. When it comes to a growth mindset, the process is just as, if not more important than the result. Nancy Chick also supports this in her paper on metacognition, "Those who know their strengths and weaknesses in these areas will be more likely to actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tasks and performances." (Chick) In order to utilize a growth mindset, both Chick and Dweck argue that is necessary to actively strive for improvement. Without the knowledge of one's shortcomings a person cannot put effort in where it is needed and therefore cannot improve.

MSS One of the most important ways to help children reap the benefits of a growth mindset is knowing how and when to reward them. “Praise wisely, not praising intelligence or talent. That has failed, don’t do that anymore. But praising the process that kids engage in, their effort, their strategies, their focus, their Perserverance, their improvement.” (Dweck) By rewarding the efforts put in to overcome a challenge, people become more resilient because they can apply those lessons to more than just that one obstacle. This theory is also backed up by Chick when she explains that “Metacognitive practices increase students’ abilities to transfer or adapt their learning to new contexts and tasks.” (Chick) A persons view of themself is often based on how they are rewarded. For example, someone may identify as an athlete because they have gotten lots of trophies for winning sports games, and they are always picked first for teams in gym class. They see themselves as good at sports because that is what they have always been told through praise from others whenever they do those things. However, that same person may see themselves as not very good at math, because they are constantly punished for doing poorly on exams. When applying Dweck’s theory of praising improvement over results, people can learn where they need to put in more effort, and they can learn to persevere through all areas instead of just one. Going back to the example of the athlete, if they were instead rewarded for all the time and effort, they put into improving, they could then understand that learning math can be achieved with a similar process of trial and error and accepting a challenge head on even ever the opportunity arises. (End)