Growth Mindset Scale

Factor: Power and Autonomy

Age: Child, Teen, Adult

Duration: Less than 3 minutes

Reading Level: 6th-8th grade

What

Psychologist Carol Dweck (1999, 2006) created the 3-item Growth Mindset Scale to measure how much people believe that they can get smarter if they work at it.

Who

Researchers have used this scale primarily with students, including college students whose parents did not complete a four-year college degree (i.e., first-generation college students) and high school students living on a low income in Chile (Claro, Paunesku, & Dweck, 2016). Researchers have also used this scale with adults (Thompson et al., 2013), although not with adults in poverty.

How

INSTRUCTIONS

Using a 6-point scale (1 = strongly agree; 6 = strongly disagree), respondents show how much they agree with three statements about whether their efforts can change their intelligence such as, “You can learn new things, but you can’t really change your basic intelligence.”

Dweck’s research shows that people have different beliefs about how much they can change their intelligence. People with a growth mindset believe that they can get smarter with effort. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are born with a certain amount of intelligence and there is little they can do to change it.

RESPONSE FORMAT

1 = strongly agree; 2 = agree; 3 = mostly agree; 4 = mostly disagree; 5 = disagree; 6 = strongly disagree.

Why It Matters

Having a growth mindset helps students excel in school, which in turn can help them move out of poverty (Card, 2001). Compared to students with fixed mindsets, for instance, students with growth mindsets like school more, take on more challenging tasks, learn more, and earn better grades (Aronson, Fried, & Good, 2002; Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007; Romero et al., 2014).

Unfortunately, children in families living on a lower income are less likely to have a growth mindset than are children in families living on a higher income (Claro, Paunesku, & Dweck, 2016). Yet parents and teachers can change children’s mindsets. For example, praising children for their effort (“You worked so hard to learn this!”) causes them to have growth mindsets, while praising them for their intelligence (“You’re so smart!”) causes them to have fixed mindsets (Mueller & Dweck, 1998). Similarly, parents who see failure as helpful tend to have children with growth mindsets, whereas parents who see failure as harmful tend to have children with fixed mindsets (Haimovitz & Dweck, 2016).

HEADS UP

The Growth Mindset Scale is usually given to children and teens, not adults. And though it is plausible that adopting a growth mindset may help move people out of poverty, no study has directly tested this idea.

SEE ALSO

“Kind of Person” Implicit Theory Scale

Beliefs About Social Mobility Scale

References

Aronson, J., Fried, C. B., & Good, C. (2002). Reducing the effects of stereotype threat on African American college students by shaping theories of intelligence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 113–125.

Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Development, 78(1), 246-263.

Card, D. (2001). Estimating the return to schooling: Progress on some persistent econometric problems. Econometrica, 69(5), 1127-1160.

Claro, S., Paunesku, D., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). Growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic achievement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(31), 8664-8668.

Dweck, C. S. (1999). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.

Dweck, C. S., Chiu, C. Y., & Hong, Y. Y. (1995). Implicit theories and their role in judgments and reactions: A world from two perspectives. Psychological Inquiry, 6(4), 267-285.

Haimovitz, K., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). Parents’ views of failure predict children’s fixed and growth intelligence mind-sets. Psychological Science, 27(6), 859-869.

Mueller, C. M., & Dweck, C. S. (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children’s motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 33-52.

Romero, C., Master, A., Paunesku, D., Dweck, C. S., & Gross, J. J. (2014). Academic and emotional functioning in middle school: The role of implicit theories. Emotion, 14(2), 227-234.

Thompson, T. W., Waskom, M. L., Garel, K. L. A., Cardenas-Iniguez, C., Reynolds, G. O., Winter, R., … & Gabrieli, J. D. (2013). Failure of working memory training to enhance cognition or intelligence. PloS one, 8(5), e63614.