The beginning of the article really struck me because it is definitely what I have seen in my experience with education. I have frequently seen the idea of “fixed intelligence” being projected by faculty especially in regards to achieving higher education and subsequently being adopted by students. For me, I was always praised for being smart so much that I had to teach myself how to study in high school and college. When I was younger, things like reading and writing came very easily to me and therefore I never learned how to work at something that was hard for me. It got to the point where I would give up caring if an assignment was too hard, but also if it was too easy. I only had a few teachers who saw past that and found out what would be the best way to push me into being the best student I could be in my own way. For that reason I think that praising children for things that they are born with is not optimal, as the article says it is much more beneficial to praise for effort, hard work and perseverance. In a similar way, I think it can also be detrimental for colleges to only go for students with perfect GPAs. While it obviously is difficult to maintain perfect grades throughout high school, it is a detriment to the school to ignore students who may have initially had bad grades but who significantly improved, or to dismiss students who may have done slightly less well than others but who truly put in the effort to get a B in a class. In the real world, we need more people who have failed but persevered, who know how to problem solve, who know how to think outside of the box, and a lot of those people do not have perfect grades. Furthermore, I have seen how this fixed mindset is really harmful to people who have learning disabilities or cognitive delays, as well as those who are just not smart in an academic way. A lot of times these students are already at a disadvantage, so praising for only academic achievement can give them a very low self esteem. They are often labeled at a young age as dumb or lazy and those labels more often than not have a lasting impact on how they see themselves. A growth mindset is far more beneficial for having people grow up to be confident, resilient and productive members of society. It also allows for more qualified people to be recognized. A lot of people are successful but not necessarily good at what they do, and in contrast to that, there are a lot of people who have potential but no confidence to do what they are meant to do. In conclusion, I think that in this day and age that children are not being praised too much, but rather for the wrong thing and that is what is causing problems.
After taking Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies, I have a better understanding of how a class that has more of a growth mindset works. This class was a pass/no pass class, meaning that it didn’t give out letter or numerical grades at any point during the class or at the end of it. Professor Cheney explained to us that the IDS department did this very deliberately, wanting to focus on bettering the students rather than letters and numbers. At first I know I and a lot of my classmates were very frustrated by this, because we have all done a lot of work for this class, but I have found now that I need to quantify success by something other than a letter grade. Yes, it would’ve been nice to have another A to boost my GPA, but I learned so much in this class that it definitely was not for nothing. As the growth mindset shows, students need to move away from only being motivated by grades and start being motivating by knowledge and perseverance and work ethic. While I know that it would be hard to move away from a typical grading scale for all classes, I think that all classes can adopt the growth mindset and move away from the idea of fixed intelligence, a concept that has been historically detrimental to many students.
Original post can be found here.
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