Can moving disadvantaged children towards a growth mindset improve their academic results? Chris Leach, Key Stage Leader, Monks Risborough School Introduction In the financial year 2014-15, schools in England received approximately £2.5 billion in extra funding to support and raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils. This pupil premium funding has become an effective method of supporting the most vulnerable children in our schools and school leaders need to pay careful attention to the support they provide these pupil premium children. In my experience, these disadvantaged children display significantly poorer learning behaviour than their peers, which can lead to lower academic attainment in the classroom. Therefore, the purpose of this action research project was to examine how introducing growth mindset principles to disadvantaged children affected their learning behaviour and academic attainment. Whilst many high-attaining children receive pupil premium funding, it is usually the case that the majority of these children in receipt of the funding will be working below national expectations. More importantly, these children face a myriad of different problems outside the classroom including poverty and disadvantage which can lead to apathetic attitudes towards life as well as low aspirations for the future which, in the classroom, lead to poor motivation and learning behaviour. After years of researching children’s learning behaviour in the classroom, Dweck believes that students can, depending on their own theory about their ability or intelligence, be divided into two types of attributional mindsets: a growth
mindset or a fixed mindset. Students who have a fixed mindset believe that intelligence is a ‘fixed’ trait which is set at birth and is unchangeable. Unfortunately, these students believe there is little, if anything, they can do to improve their intelligence as they believe it is a hereditary trait and that schoolwork will either come easily or will always be too difficult. In stark contrast, children with a growth mindset believe that intelligence is a malleable quality that can be increased through hard work. These students believe that improving one’s ability or intelligence requires time and effort and, in the case of a setback, display mastery-oriented strategies, such as effort escalation or strategy change, in order to complete a task and ‘grow’ their intelligence. In this way, children with a growth mindset find challenges energising rather than intimidating because they offer opportunities to learn. There is now a growing body of research that suggests that when pupils face large challenges or difficulties, those students with a growth mindset perform better than their peers with a fixed mindset. For example, Stipek & Gralinski (1996) found that students with a growth mindset earned significantly higher results than their fixed mindset peers during the first year of junior high school. Furthermore, when learning mentors were provided to students from disadvantaged backgrounds in order to move them to a growth mindset, the children’s reading performance showed a marked improvement (Good, Aronson, & Inzlicht, 2003). Findings A six-week intervention was implemented with four, infant-aged pupil-premium children from a school in Buckinghamshire. This intervention followed teaching principles outlined by Dweck’s online growth mindset tool, BrainologyTM.
Children’s attributional mindsets were assessed pre- and post-intervention, in addition to the collection of their Average Point Score (APS) for reading, writing, and maths for the Spring Term. Post-intervention assessment showed an improvement in all the children’s mindsets
as the result of a rigorous intervention. Additionally, there is initial evidence that children with more positive attitudes to their learning, as displayed by a growth mindset, make better academic progress. Recommendations
Figure 1: Mindset scores pre- and postintervention
Furthermore, when plotted against their Spring Term APS progress, a loose positive correlation is displayed.
Figure 2: Mindset improvement plotted against
the
APS
progress
across
reading, writing, and maths
This evidence suggests that children as young as five can develop a growth mindset as the result of a rigorous intervention. Additionally, there is initial mindset as the result of a rigorous
The mindset assessment tool used in this research was taken from the online BrainologyTM programme delivered to secondary school-aged children in America. Therefore, an assessment tool needs to be created using language appropriate to primary-aged children. Furthermore, the BrainologyTM lessons need to be adapted so that mindset concepts are explained in ‘primary-friendly’ language. Finally, further research with larger sample sizes and longer intervention lengths needs to be carried out.
References Good, C., Aronson, J., & Inzlicht, M. (2003) ‘Improving adolescents’ standardized test performance: An intervention to reduce the effects of stereotype threat’, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 24 (6), p.645-662. Stipek. D. & Gralinski, J. H. (1996) ‘Children’s beliefs about intelligence and school performance’, Journal of Educational Pscyhology, 88 (3), pp.397407.