Could such an approach-called a lay theory intervention-be effective before college matriculation? Could this strategy reduce a portion of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic achievement gaps for entire institutions? Three double-blind experiments tested this possibility. Previous experiments have shown that college students benefit when they understand that challenges in the transition to college are common and improvable and, thus, that early struggles need not portend a permanent lack of belonging or potential. N., Paunesku, D., Keane, L., Kamentz, D., Ritter, G., Duckworth, A.

Teaching a lay theory before college narrows achievement gaps at scale PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Yeager, D.

View details for PubMedCentralID PMC4978255 These results suggest that students' mindsets may temper or exacerbate the effects of economic disadvantage on a systemic level. Furthermore, we find that students from lower-income families were less likely to hold a growth mindset than their wealthier peers, but those who did hold a growth mindset were appreciably buffered against the deleterious effects of poverty on achievement: students in the lowest 10th percentile of family income who exhibited a growth mindset showed academic performance as high as that of fixed mindset students from the 80th income percentile. Extending prior research, we find that a growth mindset (the belief that intelligence is not fixed and can be developed) is a comparably strong predictor of achievement and that it exhibits a positive relationship with achievement across all of the socioeconomic strata in the country. Confirming prior research, we find that family income is a strong predictor of achievement. In this research, we use a nationwide sample of high school students from Chile to investigate how these factors interact on a systemic level. Two largely separate bodies of empirical research have shown that academic achievement is influenced by structural factors, such as socioeconomic background, and psychological factors, such as students' beliefs about their abilities.

Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.

Office of Vice President for Business Affairs and Chief Financial Officer.

Office of VP for University Human Resources.

Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.

Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI).

Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME).

Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

Dr carol s dweck