After scouring 24 ‘high quality’ studies on growth mindset interventions in schools, Carolina Gazmuri, from Durham University in the UK, has warned schools and policymakers against investing any significant amount of time or resources into their implementation.

“This is the headline finding of the review,” she writes.

“… the anticipated outcomes are likely to be either null or very modest.”

While the research literature consistently demonstrates a correlation between academic outcomes and growth mindset, Gazmuri's study reveals that even the most rigorous causal studies show only weak, if any, effects of mindset interventions on student performance.

And this was despite many interventions successfully ushering children from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

“This finding prompts the critical question of whether these interventions are genuinely altering students’ underlying beliefs or merely influencing their responses to mindset questionnaires,” the researcher poses.

Coined by US psychologist Carol Dweck, the concept of Growth Mindset has gained widespread popularity over the past decade, with multiple experts and organisations offering up school talks, training and resources aligned with the theory.  

It posits that students can have either ‘fixed’ or ‘growth’ mindsets and that these have a significant impact on their learning outcomes, and is one of the most influential ideas in 21st century education.

Yet as Gazmuri notes, “substantial” financial resources have been funnelled into the area, despite the fact that the actual impact of Growth Mindset interventions “remains a contentious issue among scholars”.

Her own findings reveal that even the most reliable research (studies with larger sample sizes, minimal missing data and data of a high quality) did not uncover any meaningful effect on students’ academic outcomes.

Apparent conflict of interest in the existing research was also highlighted.

Seven out of the 24 papers analysed were found to have authors with a possible conflict of interest in their research findings.

Under Gazmuri’s definition, this meant that one or more of the researchers had direct involvement such as being a founder, co-founder, owner, part of the board, or receiving paid compensation from organisations that sell products related to mindset training, or they charged considerable fees to deliver growth mindset talks.

“…it is noteworthy that studies involving conflicts of interest mostly report positive effect sizes.

“This could mean that some studies with negative results might not be getting published, partly due to the conflicts of interest held by their authors,” she states.

A 2022 study out of the US found researchers with a financial incentive to report positive effects, were more than twice as likely to do so.

“We knew it was an issue, but we didn’t know how many we would find,” Brooke Macnamara of Case Western Reserve University, one of the study’s lead researchers, told EducationHQ at the time.

“We were probably half surprised by it – if we were completely blindsided by it we wouldn’t have thought to look into it. We had an inkling.

“This is usually not a problem in psychology, but it is in the growth mindset world.”

A philosophy, not an academic intervention

Dr Carl Hendrick, science of learning expert and Professor of Education at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam, recently highlighted Gazmuri’s study on his Substack.

“I’d say for teachers and school leaders, the key takeaway is that Growth Mindset is a philosophy not an academic intervention,” he concludes.

“While a growth mindset can be a useful lens for classroom culture or a component of pastoral work, it should not be treated as a silver bullet for raising academic outcomes.”

Rather, Hendrick advises, teachers and school leaders should prioritise “well-evidenced instructional practices”, such as explicit teaching, retrieval practice, and curriculum ‘coherence’.

“If mindset activities are implemented, they should be low-cost, time-efficient, and embedded within broader efforts to support motivation, resilience, or self-regulation, not bolted on as a standalone intervention,” he adds.

In a separate article, Hendrick mounts a comprehensive case for why growth mindset is “a cautionary tale about what happens when psychological theories are translated into the reality of the classroom, no matter how well-intentioned”.

One explanation for the theory’s widespread influence is that it reaffirms something many teachers already believe, Macnamara suggests.

“This idea is something that teachers were already thinking.

“It put a label on something they were already thinking, so it was embraced very easily. That’s one perspective.

“It sounds promising and good, especially the idea that this is something that is going to improve students’ academic achievement, and we can achieve this in just a 45-minute session, I mean that sounds great – why wouldn’t you want to believe it?”

This is a classic case of confirmation bias at work, she indicates.

“When you want to believe something, there’s confirmation bias. You look for evidence to support it and you’re less likely to be critical of it.”