It is a generation in which academic success is predominantly defined by the grades obtained by students, and their ability to showcase their understanding of concepts through performance accuracy. The words that both parents and teachers choose to use in their feedback and guidance, therefore, could go a long way toward shaping students’ beliefs about what they are capable of accomplishing.
Carol Dweck’s research on the development of a growth mindset (the belief that one’s abilities such as intelligence or talent are malleable and can be improved with learning and effort) as opposed to a fixed mindset (the belief that these abilities are not capable of change) has gained notable attention amongst educationists, and motivation and positive psychologists. In her book, The New Psychology of Success”, Dweck notes how the wording of feedback can have a profound impact on students’ beliefs about improving their capabilities. Evidence from a longitudinal field study of junior high school students that aimed at tracking their grade trajectories over a period of 2 years revealed a significant improvement in the grades of students who held an incremental theory of intelligence (to believe that intelligence is malleable). The grades of those with an entity theory of intelligence (the belief that one’s intelligence is fixed, not capable of growth), on the other hand, declined over the 2-year period.
In a Ted Talk on the “Power of Yet” , Carol Dweck talks about how framing feedback constructively is integral to shaping students’ mindsets. She uses the example of a high school in Chicago in the U.S. that provided students the grade “Not Yet” when they did not pass a course, thereby enabling them to understand that they were on a learning curve, and that they would eventually get there. She argues that praising the process that was undertaken by a student to accomplish intelligence rather than praising the intelligence itself can build resilience in children. Besides this, she suggests that developing games that reward children for their effort, strategies and progress rather than rewarding them for getting answers right amongst other interventions, could be a potential way of inculcating a process-driven mindset in students. Studies seeking neural evidence on the growth mindset have revealed that students with this mindset exhibited a higher amplitude of the error positivity (Pe), a neural response in the brain that reflects an individual’s awareness of an error committed (a higher amplitude reflecting superior error awareness). These individuals have been found to also display enhanced performance post error commission.
Rau (2016) discusses how students in schools today primarily strove for immediate gratification. She states that she realized how the language she used in her conversations with students made them prioritize aspects such as quickness and completion over learning. The author makes a mention of one of her students who explained that he wanted to be faster in completing tasks and another student whose written responses indicated that he was inclined to mastering content and completing tasks. Findings from her study demonstrated that adopting process-oriented feedback language and questioning (for example, conveying to the student how his/her hard work was evident in the task and asking questions on how they figured something out or what they would do differently the next time) during classroom instruction resulted in a shift in students’ mindsets. They moved along a continuum — starting by focussing on speed of completion, to trying to accomplish proficiency in a specific skill or content area, to then eventually focussing on effort, learning and growing over time.
The aforementioned studies that substantiate the critical importance of communicating constructive feedback, indicate how developing and testing more such applied interventions could facilitate a positive change in students’ performance outlook. Having dedicated, goal-directed classroom interactions can be promising where the importance of focusing on the process to reach a goal is emphasized rather than the goal itself, and where there are conversations enabling students to confidently and openly discuss their perceived weaknesses and emotions. Additionally, continuing to develop experiments that specifically test how the framing of feedback (process-driven vs. performance-oriented) impacts subsequent task performance could further inform us about the effectiveness of constructive feedback in academic contexts.
Varun Ramgopal
