Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset: From an IQ Seating Chart to Failed Trials

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In the 1950s at PS 153 in Brooklyn, a sixth grade teacher seated students by IQ score, and the top scorers got to carry the flag and erase the board. One of those students, Carol Dweck, born in New York City in 1946, became so afraid of losing her smart label that she backed out of a spelling bee and a French competition. She graduated from Barnard College in 1967 and earned her PhD in psychology from Yale in 1972 with work on learned helplessness, then moved through the University of Illinois, Harvard's Laboratory of Human Development, Columbia and, in 2004, an endowed professorship at Stanford. A 1988 paper introduced implicit theories of intelligence, the split between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, and her 2006 book Mindset carried the idea into boardrooms, sports teams and schools.

As the concept spread, its message drifted. Dweck warned that praising children's intelligence harms motivation and urged praise for strategy and effort that leads somewhere, yet the public often reduced it to rewarding effort alone, and she publicly pushed back. Edinburgh psychologist Timothy Bates repeatedly failed to replicate her findings, statistician Nick Brown's GRIM test flagged impossible averages in a 1998 study, and a July 2019 Education Endowment Foundation trial in more than 100 English schools found no added progress in reading, grammar or math. Educators Matt O'Leary and David James argued that mindset programs can shift blame for systemic failures onto individual students. Dweck nonetheless won major honors and in 2017 proposed a broader unified theory of motivation, beliefs and personality.

• Dweck's thesis focused on learned helplessness, in which subjects stop trying to escape negative events even when escape becomes possible.
• When the GRIM test exposed the 1998 errors, she reviewed her raw data, traced them to manual recording mistakes by assistants, and was commended by Brown for her transparency.
• The 2019 trial covered more than 5,000 pupils, with teachers trained to deliver her framing.
• O'Leary noted that his own six-year-old daughter was being graded on her attitude toward learning.
• In 2017 she was named an inaugural laureate of the Yidan Prize, worth nearly $4 million in cash and project funding.