Developing a "Growth Mindset" in your students: Feedback implications

One quite important factor that influences how students react to feedback is the way that students make sense of successes and failures in school. When you ask students about the reasons for success and failure - their answers differ in three important ways: personalisation, stability and specificity.

Personalisation: Students attribute successes and failures to internal factors (how smart they are, how much effort they put in) or external factors that are outside their control (whether the teacher likes them, good or bad luck).

Stability: Students attribute successes and failures to relatively fixed factors, such as being smart, while others attribute successes and failures to transient factors, such as how much or how little effort they put into that particular task.

Specificity: Students differ in the way they generalise from particular examples of successes and failures to other areas of experience. Some students overgeneralise success or failure, so they take success or failure in one aspect of one's life as being indicative of the likely outcomes in completely unrelated areas.

One particular set of beliefs that strongly influences how students make sense of successes and failures in school, which in turn influence how they respond to feedback, relates to students' view of the nature of intelligence - what Carol Dweck calls mindset (Dweck, 2006)

Some students have an "entity" view of intelligence. They believe that each person is endowed, either at conception or birth or certainly very early in life, with a certain amount of intelligence that is pretty much fixed for the rest of one's life. Other students hold a more incremental view of intelligence. They believe that intelligence is inherently malleable and in particular that engaging in challenging work can increase it.

According to Wiliam(2015) what is rather striking is that very subtle differences in the way we praise children can have serious long term effects. Very young children (one to three years old) whom their parents praise for their effort rather than their achievement are likely to have an incremental view of intelligence five years later. He suggests that it is proven that we can change those views and that when students develop more incremental views of intelligence they learn more. He suggests that even small interventions can change students view of intelligence.

Help students see the Connection between feedback and the Improvement.

To be continued...