When in a struggle of any capacity, What drives you to keep pushing forward? What makes your struggle worth it or is it all pointless, do you see it as something to reflect on or do you just see it as a loss and move on, did you push through till the end or did you stop while you were ahead. I ask these questions to have you consider if you ever felt like you’re being held back or ever just felt if your efforts are meaningless, as it all correlates to how your mindset is hardwired, “Your very own mindset is the best predictor for success.” According to Carol Dweck, Carissa Romero and researchers from the National University of Singapore this seems to be the case. These Researchers have been looking at different mindsets and looking at how they work. Each of these researchers uses different methods to figure out how it works. Carol Dweck has been researching these mindsets for many years in fact she’s been researching for her entire career breaking down each mindset and describing how they work. Carissa Romero’s research is similar but she uses graphs to help explain differences between mindsets.
Carol Dweck, a formal Psychologist spent her entire career studying attitude and performance, and overall she concluded that your mindset is the best predictor for success. She begins to explain that people’s attitude corresponds to one of the two categories of fixed or growth mindset.”With a fixed mindset, you believe you are who you are and you cannot change. This creates problems when you’re challenged because anything that appears to be more than you can handle is bound to make you feel hopeless and overwhelmed. People with a growth mindset believe that they can improve with effort. They outperform those with a fixed mindset, even when they have a lower IQ, because they embrace challenges, treating them as opportunities to learn something new.” This demonstrates how both mindsets work. This in itself can show how people with growth mindsets are successful because all successful people have their ups and downs but they don’t stop and that’s what makes them successful. They keep trying to improve and put in the work necessary to get where they want to be.
Carissa Romero is a passionate person who applies psychological research to real-world problems. Carrissa begins her research by explaining what both mindsets mean. Then she later breaks down everything into charts. Carissa begins by saying “Researchers recently examined the relationship between 10th-grade students’ mindsets and performance on a national achievement test in Chile.2 Students who held a growth mindset were three times more likely to score in the top 20% on the test, while students with a fixed mindset were four times more likely to score in the bottom 20%” The graph demonstrates the people who had growth mindsets were the same people who performed better than those with growth because one of the biggest differences between growth and fixed is that fixed mindsets believe they can’t achieve something, they believe that things that can be so easily achieved is one of the hardest tasks to do all because they have this mindset. Carissa later demonstrates a chart that shows people who attended a growth mindset program she says “mindset programs such as these do not simply tell students to adopt a growth mindset. They help them understand why effort, the right strategies, and good advice are important—because these actions help students develop their intelligence. And by asking students to write about what they’ve learned in service of other students who are struggling, students come to internalize the message themselves. In multiple studies with thousands of students across the country, researchers have found that students who receive these programs earn more course credits, higher grades, and higher standardized test scores.” She basically reveals that this program that allowed students to figure out themselves how growth mindsets can help them essentially was able to adapt this mindset and grow much more than students who developed a fixed mindset and didn’t take this program”.
Assistant Professor Patricia Chen from the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore also demonstrates that to succeed in life you need to complete very challenging tasks and the way you choose to attack those types of problems all depends on the type of mindset you have. Patricia Chen conducts many different researches regarding college students and adults on their success in life based on mindsets. In her research overall she determines that they “achieve higher school grades, make greater progress towards their professional, health, and fitness goals, and even perform a novel challenging task more efficiently.”
Both Carol Dweck and Carrisa Romero’s ideology both show how each mindsets work and how they affect people. Their research that they have found during their career has concluded that people with a growth mindset tend to be more successful than others all because of how they think. This specific assignment was created around the idea of how mindset determines your success and with the research done this idea was proven to be completely true. Both Dweck and Romero had their ways of describing mindset and their different ways to collaborate with each other to help build up that one idea. The research of Patricia Chen was also great at revealing that the type of mindset you have can really predict your success in life.
“According to Dweck’s (1999) social cognitive model of achievement motivation the way individuals view the nature of intelligence influence their interpretation and reactions to adverse academic situations which consequently have considerable implications in their academic progress” this statement by Dweck’s was a stepping stone for researchers to study how the influences they see from there livelihood can affect them at school, “Debra, taught her 2nd grade students that learning changes the brain and described how effort and good strategies would help them become smarter.” As this was the basis for the exprime she provided more expressive ideas such as thinking stems exercise for class, allowing them more opportunity to grow and as a result massively improving their basic reading and writing skills and for some even let them go beyond what was expected of them.
“As stated by Dweck (2008) fixed mindset transforms failure from an action (“I failed this exam.”) into an identity (“I failed this exam because I am stupid.”)Bradberry, Travis.” another experiment that was conducted was at a college and was a self-assessment in if they satisfied with themselves and their efforts after two years of their experience, as the results of the experiment where presents they way they concluded if they had identified a fixed mindset as they concluded from the surveys the person’s self-esteem and self-satisfaction as the main contingency with fixed mindsets is if they see themselves as needing to constantly improve but missing the mark on how as the failure or lose is turned from a potential lesson to a reason as to why they should doubt there intellect and as result are perpetuated into a loop of Constantine self hated and doubt resulting in no room for growth, overthink and more possible failure.
These two studies have helped bring out a more visual example of how important your mindset can be as your own thought process could be the reason why you thrive off faile as you learn and overcome, get better, grow stronger but at the same time it could also be the reason why you fail why it burdes you so much because you allow it to affect you, you let it hold you confined to what you think your capable of, and that why you should never doubt yourself.
Cited Sources
(Bradberry, Travis. “What Is the Best Predictor of Success?” World Economic Forum, 12 Oct. 2015)
www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/10/what-is-the-best-predictor-of-success/.
(WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT GROWTH MINDSET FROM SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH | 2. 2015.)
“Researchers Uncover a New Mindset That Predicts Success.” ScienceDaily, 2020, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200610094106.htm
(Gál,Éva. “Fixed intelligence mindset prospectively predicts students’ self-esteem.”
(Donna Wilson, Marcus Conyers.”Developing Growth Mindsets : Principles and Practices for Maximizing Students’ Potential”)
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