Source: Wikimedia Commons, Boss1000

There are many rewards for doing research in psychology. For one, it is just plain fun. There is something powerful about making progress on one of the world’s great scientific mysteries. For another, the things we learn about psychology have the potential to make people’s lives better.

That is the impetus behind a fascinating paper in the June 2015 issue of Psychological Science by David Paunesku, Gregory Walton, Carissa Romero, Eric Smith, David Yeager, and Carol Dweck.

They were interested in whether interventions that have been shown to help improve the performance of students in small-scale studies could be turned into a successful intervention on a larger scale. That is, could basic research in psychology help improve student performance?

They explored the influence of two interventions. The first was based on research by Carol Dweck and her colleagues on mindsets. Many previous studies (some of which I have written about on this blog before) have demonstrated that a helps students overcome academic challenges. A growth mindset about is the belief that people can get smarter through hard work because that work causes the brain to change and grow.

The second was based on research by my University of Texas colleague David Yeager and his collaborators. This work focuses on helping students to see the purpose of their schoolwork. In particular, studies suggest that it is helpful for students to recognize how the topics they explore in school can help them to make the world a better place (rather than just helping to make them more economically competitive in the future).

In this study, over 1,500 high school students from 13 different schools participated in the study. Students were given two 45-minute lessons spread over two weeks. One group was given both a lesson on growth mindset (which focused on learning that the brain changes as you learn) and a lesson on purpose (which focused on helping students to figure out how their school work would allow them to help others). A second group received only a growth mindset lesson (and a control lesson in the other session that focused on economic goals or how their lives changed because they were in high school). A third group received only a purpose lesson (and a control lesson in the other session that focused on the brain, but did not talk about how the brain changes with learning). A final group received only the two control lessons and neither of the interventions.

The researchers looked at student grade-point average in the semester before and after the intervention as well as their level of satisfactory performance in core classes (English, Math, Science, and Social Studies).

High-performing students were not affected by these manipulations. However, the low-performing students were helped significantly by the interventions. Compared to the control group, students given either the growth or purpose intervention (or both) improved their overall GPA compared to the control group and about 6% more of these students passed their core classes.

It is not surprising that the intervention did not affect the best students that much. These students have likely already learned the lesson that success in school requires hard work. The lowest-performing students are at risk for giving up. When these students believe that hard work will be rewarded and that there is a real purpose for going to school, it improves their overall to succeed in school.

It is important to recognize that significant gains in performance came from a fairly small manipulation. It could be hard to get school districts to adopt a long curriculum on mindsets and purpose, but one or two short modules is something that schools could put in place.

It was also interesting that the combination of the two interventions was no more successful than either one alone. The authors suggest that this may reflect that the interventions did not attempt to connect growth mindset and purpose. Future research should examine whether there are ways to make a combination of these interventions more effective than either one alone.

Not only is this research exciting on its own, it is also a great demonstration of how lab studies can be used to develop interventions that have a broader impact on society.

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