Growth Mindset

STUDENTS’ MINDSET & THEIR LEARNING SUCCESS

The success of the education we offer depends on how well we understand learning, the things that can have an adverse effect on it, and design the learning experience accordingly. The educational psychology literature provides information on some basic factors that influence learning. Keeping an eye on this literature might help us achieve greater success with the education we offer.

When we look at the education literature, we see that academic achievement is associated with many factors. Among these are factors that have strong predictive power, such as intelligence and personality, but the stronger ones are mostly motivational, and among them, the strongest is the effort. In other words, no matter how intelligent our students might be, their achievement will be more dependent on their effort and persistence. 

If the effort is so important, why can't all the students who try really hard actually succeed? After all, isn’t this what they all claim to be doing? Trying really hard? Doing their best? Well, everyone's learning success varies depending on the things they struggle with. A student's genuine effort to learn something entails asking a lot of questions, thinking, researching, experimenting and evaluating. They need to manage their resources well and use them correctly. The students who do these are being active in the learning process and only this type of effort can bring them learning success. So, how active are our students in general? And how realistic is it to expect learning success from students who are afraid to ask questions, fear to try, and avoid self-assessment?

Many studies conducted in the United States provide us with information about how we should offer our students the education we need for our future. In response to the question “What should be our educational model?” the Center for Curriculum Redesign put forth the elements of knowledge, skills and character aspects that need to be developed for our future and drew attention to what they call “meta-learning,” a factor that encompasses all three aspects. Here, meta-learning is used to express how we think and adapt to the situations we face, and is made up of growth mindset and metacognition [1].