What do we do when something is difficult?
Quod natura non dat, Salmantica non praestat. What nature does not give, Salamanca cannot provide. The phrase, traditionally associated with the University of Salamanca, has survived for centuries as a statement about the limits of education: however excellent the teaching may be, it can do little when the underlying ability is lacking. You can study, practise, and have good teachers. But talent is innate.
Carol Dweck has devoted much of her career to studying what happens when we think this way.
Her work began in the late 1960s, long before the terms mindset and growth mindset entered the vocabulary of education. At the time, Dweck was studying how children responded to problems they were unable to solve. Some gave up quickly. Others kept trying. And it was not always the students considered the most intelligent who showed the greatest perseverance.
Those differences were of interest to psychologists studying what was known as learned helplessness: after repeatedly experiencing that their actions produce no results, people may eventually behave as though nothing they do can change the situation. Dweck brought this problem into the field of learning and began studying the explanations children themselves gave for their successes and failures.
Why did I fail? I’m not intelligent enough? Because the exercise was difficult? Did I used the wrong strategy? Because I need more practice? The answers mattered. Attributing failure to a stable lack of ability encouraged helpless responses. Attributing it instead to factors that could be acted upon opened up other possibilities for behaviour. From those early studies, Dweck continued to develop her research into beliefs about intelligence over the following decades.
This would eventually give rise to the two terms that made her work famous. People with a fixed mindset tend to view intelligence and other abilities as relatively stable traits. You either have them or you do not. From a growth mindset perspective, those abilities can be developed through learning, practice, effective strategies, help, and experience.
The consequences become particularly clear when difficulties arise. For a student convinced that maths is “not their thing,” getting stuck on an equation can confirm something they believe they already know about themselves. Another student may interpret exactly the same difficulty as a sign that they need to find a different strategy or understand something they have missed. Neither belief solves the equation. But it does influence what the student does next.
Dweck spent decades investigating these responses and the beliefs behind them. In 2006, she brought much of this work together in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. The book took concepts beyond academic psychology that would soon find a huge audience among teachers and families.
Twenty years later, the old Salamanca motto provides a curious counterpoint to her work. Salamanca warned that education cannot give what nature has denied. Dweck introduced a different possibility: perhaps we decide too quickly what, exactly, nature has given.
The undesirable effects of praise
In 1998, Carol Dweck and psychologist Claudia Mueller published six studies involving more than 400 children between the ages of nine and twelve. The procedure began in much the same way for everyone. Students completed a series of problems and, when they finished, received a few words of praise.
Some were told that they must be very intelligent. Others were told that they must have worked very hard. Then came new exercises and the opportunity to choose what kind of task they wanted to tackle next.
Children praised for their intelligence tended to choose problems that allowed them to continue demonstrating that they were good at them. Those praised for their effort showed greater interest in tasks from which they could learn something new. When the researchers increased the difficulty, the first group enjoyed the tasks less, persisted less, and ultimately performed worse than the second. Unexpected differences even emerged when participants were asked to report their scores to other children: those who had been praised for their intelligence were more likely to inflate them.
What had happened between one exercise and the next? Just a few words.
For Dweck and Mueller, the praise had given the children an explanation for their own success. If someone told them, “You’re so smart,” intelligence took centre stage. Maintaining that perception could then become important. Choosing a difficult task carried the possibility of making a mistake and calling that perception into question.
The experiment challenged a widespread practice among parents and teachers. For years, boosting children’s self-esteem had seemed a logical way to improve their academic confidence. Telling a student that they were intelligent, brilliant, or especially gifted should encourage them. Dweck’s findings suggested that this kind of praise could also have less desirable effects.
The alternative was not simply to replace “you’re very smart” with “you worked really hard.” Dweck’s later work refined the concept towards what she calls process praise: directing attention towards the strategies used, the decisions made, concentration, seeking help, and the things students can change in order to make progress.
This approach also gave rise to a word that has become almost emblematic of the growth mindset: “yet.”
“I can’t do division.”
“I can’t do division yet.”
The problem remains unsolved. What changes is the expectation of what may happen next. The second statement leaves open the possibility of learning.
That “yet” does not promise that everyone can achieve anything, either. Dweck has never argued that individual differences disappear through willpower. Her research points to something more specific: abilities do not necessarily remain where we find them, and the beliefs we hold about them influence the decisions we make to develop them.
For teachers, this considerably expands the territory of feedback. A correction may simply indicate that an answer is wrong. It can also help students understand why it is wrong, what knowledge is missing, or what strategy they might try next.
When the growth mindset entered the classroom
The publication of Mindset in 2006 transformed years of academic research into an international phenomenon. The book reached teachers, families, coaches, and businesses. Education proved particularly fertile ground. Few ideas fitted better with a fundamental aspiration of schooling: that what a student can do today should not definitively determine what they will be able to do tomorrow.
Over the following decade, the growth mindset appeared in teacher-training programmes, school projects, and teaching materials. Posters began appearing on classroom walls transforming “I can’t do it” into “I can’t do it yet.” Mistakes began to be championed as part of learning. The language used by teachers and families became part of the conversation about how academic expectations are formed.
Articles published by The Guardian during those years offer a good snapshot of this expansion. In 2015, the newspaper spoke of a possible “revolution” in the way children were taught and described schools that were abandoning some traditional ideas about talent and ability to pay greater attention to practice, feedback, and improvement. Another article that same year suggested questions teachers could use to encourage students to reflect on their mistakes, seek feedback, and decide what to do after a setback.
Two years later, the recommendations had become more specific: offer different routes to solving a problem, teach strategies, set tasks that require students to think, and extend work on mindset to families.
The theory had reached the classroom and was beginning to influence practice.
Consider two ways of returning a test. In the first, the student receives a 5 out of 10. They have just passed, and that is the end of the story. In the second, in addition to knowing their score, they can identify the mistakes they made, receive guidance on how to correct them, and have an opportunity to use that information in a new task. The grade is the same; the learning experience is not.
Something similar happens with levels of difficulty. If students who perform poorly are systematically assigned easier exercises, they will have fewer opportunities to tackle complex problems, make mistakes, and learn how to solve them. Expectations about their ability thus begin to have real consequences for the opportunities they receive.
The growth mindset brought these kinds of everyday decisions to the centre of the conversation. Feedback, assessment, opportunities for revision, and the way teachers respond to mistakes all convey information about students’ abilities.
Labels do too. “She’s brilliant at science.” “He’s more of a humanities person.” “She’s never been good at maths.” These are familiar expressions and often descriptive ones. Repeated over the years, they can eventually become part of how a child explains who they are and what is worth attempting.
People with a fixed mindset tend to view intelligence and other abilities as relatively stable traits. You either have them or you do not. From a growth mindset perspective, those abilities can be developed through learning, practice, effective strategies, help, and experience.
Much more than “try harder”
The popularity of the growth mindset soon produced a much easier version to explain: to achieve something, you have to work hard.
Motivational messages and praise for effort proliferated in some schools. Dweck began encountering teachers who claimed to have a growth mindset because they praised their students for trying, even when those students were not learning. She herself called this interpretation a false growth mindset.
In 2016, while a group of British researchers were preparing a trial involving around one hundred primary schools to test the effects of this type of intervention, Dweck explained her concerns about these interpretations to The Guardian. The growth mindset, she warned, risked repeating some of the problems of the self-esteem movement: making students feel good could end up taking the place of helping them learn.
Because some kinds of effort lead nowhere. A student can repeat an exercise twenty times in exactly the same way and get it wrong twenty times for exactly the same reason. They can spend hours memorising a text they do not understand. They can study hard and study badly. Perseverance is useful when accompanied by strategies, knowledge, feedback, and the ability to change course.
Dweck has therefore insisted on the importance of process. If one strategy fails, another must be found. When prior knowledge is missing, it must be acquired. If the student does not know how to continue, they will need help. Praise can also be specific: recognising an effective strategy, careful revision, or the decision to ask for an explanation.
There are also conditions that students cannot control. Learning requires time, materials, good teachers, opportunities to practise, and high-quality feedback. Two students may share the conviction that they are capable of improving while having very different opportunities to do so.
This point becomes particularly relevant when the growth mindset is applied in educational contexts marked by profound inequalities. Individual beliefs can influence behaviour; they cannot, by themselves, create the opportunities needed to learn.
Precision matters because it also changes the teacher’s role. Their job is not to convince students that anything is possible. It is, among many other things, to help them discover what they can do when they do not yet know how to do something.
Twenty years later: what remains of the “growth mindset”?
The enormous spread of the growth mindset made the arrival of increasingly large studies measuring its effects inevitable. And their findings have forced expectations to become more precise.
In 2018, two meta-analyses led by Victoria Sisk reviewed more than one hundred studies. They found a weak relationship between growth mindset and academic achievement, and small effects from interventions designed to change mindset. Some groups, particularly lower-achieving students and those from disadvantaged backgrounds, appeared to benefit more, although the authors urged caution.
A year later, Nature published the results of the National Study of Learning Mindsets, one of the largest experiments ever conducted on the subject. Thousands of US secondary-school students took part in an online intervention lasting less than an hour that explained that intellectual abilities can be developed. Among lower-achieving students, there was a modest improvement in grades; across the participant group as a whole, enrolment in advanced mathematics courses increased.
The effects varied between schools.
That finding has fuelled a line of research examining the interaction between individual beliefs and the environment. A student may learn that their mathematical ability can improve, but they will then return to a particular classroom, with particular classmates, a teacher, expectations, and learning opportunities. The psychological message competes or cooperates with everything else.
Research on the growth mindset remains ongoing and has generated important methodological debates. The effect sizes identified tend to be modest, and some reviews have questioned the extent to which interventions produce generalisable improvements in academic performance. Twenty years of popularity have also helped set limits on an expectation the theory was never equipped to meet: a brief intervention targeting students’ beliefs is no substitute for good teaching.
What remains, however, is half a century of research into how we interpret our own abilities and how those interpretations influence our behaviour when we learn.
There is also a warning for schools. Saying that a child “isn’t good” at maths, writing, or science may accurately describe their performance at a particular point in time. The problem arises when that description begins to be used to predict what they will be capable of learning, reduce the difficulty of what they are asked to do, or determine which opportunities they deserve to receive.
Carol Dweck began by studying children facing problems they could not solve. Some gave up; others looked for another way. Between those two behaviours lay knowledge, strategies, and previous experiences. There was also an idea about their own ability and about the possibility of changing it.
And so we return to Salamanca.
Quod natura non dat, Salmantica non praestat. The university cannot provide what nature has not given. The old aphorism retains a healthy dose of realism: education does not work miracles, and people neither start with identical abilities nor will they all end up in the same place.
Dweck forces us to be a little more cautious about the other half of the statement. Before concluding that nature did not provide it, it is worth asking how much opportunity that student has had to learn, what strategies they know, what help they have received, what they expect of themselves, and what others expect of them.
Because sometimes we are too quick to confuse what someone has not yet learned with what they will never be able to learn.
