Mindset and motivation: how much growth mindset, self-efficacy and stress management change, and what to do about imposter syndrome¶

Level: 101 · for anyone who has said "I'm just bad at math"

One line: Believing ability can grow, believing you can do this task, and keeping stress moderate all matter, and the two chapters before this one turned the mechanisms into programs. The size of the effects is where summaries overreach: mindset interventions move grades a little, mostly for students who were struggling; self-efficacy and goal-setting have stronger records; and the reliable cure for both imposter syndrome and exam nerves is the same thing, evidence from a test.

Self-regulation¶

Zakrajsek's The New Science of Learning, chapter 2, defines self-regulation as the process that gets you to your own goals: pick a target, plan, and keep to the plan when a weekend bike trip comes up. He names four parts, and this library has a page for each:

metacognition, planning, acting, evaluating and adjusting: metacognition;
avoiding procrastination, and the "I'll study more next week" it runs on: spaced retrieval says why the deferred hours are worth less;
cognitive load and automaticity: cognitive load;
self-efficacy, below.

Study Tip 2.1 is the practical rule: start as small as necessary, but develop a habit of completing whatever goal you set. A goal of twenty minutes that is always met teaches the plan to be believed; a goal of four hours usually missed teaches the opposite. His section on managing emotions (choosing situations, deploying attention, changing the situation, reappraisal, and modulating the response; a sundae after a bad day is fine, a habit of it is not) is useful and not graded here: it is advice, not a claim.

Self-efficacy¶

Albert Bandura's word (1997) for how far you believe you can succeed at this task. It predicts effort and persistence well, and the four sources he named have held up: your own past successes, watching someone like you succeed, being told you can by someone you trust, and how you read your racing heart. Grade: good evidence, over decades. The one thing to add is the lesson learned helplessness: a belief low enough to stop you trying never meets the evidence that could raise it, so the remedies that work are the ones that make trying cheap, a small step or a similar person's success. Rea and colleagues (2022, doi:10.3390/jintelligence10040127 ↗) found students can mostly recognise the effective study techniques and still not use them, and that self-efficacy and habit, not more information, are what move them.

Growth mindset¶

Carol Dweck's finding (2006) that students who believe ability can grow persist longer than those who believe it is fixed. The size of the effect of interventions on grades is the contested part: Sisk and colleagues' meta-analysis (2018) found it small, and Yeager and colleagues' national experiment (2019) found a small gain concentrated in lower-achieving students at schools where the norm supported effort. Grade: good evidence for a small effect, larger where it is needed most. Zakrajsek's steps for becoming growth-minded are cheap and worth taking anyway: say "I can't yet"; work a little on something small in the area you "can't do", then a bit bigger; read failure as feedback (Study Tip 5.1: seek out feedback whenever you can, and listen carefully); play against someone a little better. He is also careful that results vary: a classmate who took AP Biology may need one hour for what takes you three, and you can still close the gap. McGuire's version is the same list, plus rest, food and exercise, which have their own pages.

Two biases¶

Attribution bias: we put our own failures down to circumstances and other people's to character. Study Tip 5.3: if you don't do well on an exam, do not assume it was a poorly written test; that protects the ego and does not help you get better. McGuire says the same: a score "is not any indication of how smart you are. It's a reflection of your behaviors". Grade: well established as a bias.
Egocentric bias (Greenwald, 1980): we remember our part in a success as larger and in a failure as smaller than it was, and our own opinions as more right than others', not from lying but because what I did is stored more deeply. Being self-aware reduces it (Greenberg, 1983), and perspective taking is the habit that does. Grade: well established.

Imposter syndrome¶

The person who has succeeded and believes they are about to be found out. Zakrajsek says three things: nearly everyone feels it at times, so feeling it means you are like everyone else; it is more common in underrepresented groups, partly because of a double standard in how the same mistake is explained; and the way out is to listen to feedback and evidence, material you can show you know, solutions others agree with, programs you finish. That is the first chapter's rule turned round: a feeling of not knowing is not evidence either, and the record of results is. Grade: good evidence that the feeling is common and that it goes with stress and dropping out; the remedy is the same calibration check as metacognition.

Stress and anxiety¶

Acute stress at the moment of retrieval impairs it, which is what an exam blank is. Retrieval practice protects against this: Smith and colleagues (2016) found that material learned by testing survived a stress induction that wiped out material learned by restudy (Wolf and Kluge's commentary, 2017, doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00048 ↗). So the best preparation for exam nerves is the technique the library already recommends. Grade: good evidence.
Moderate arousal helps, chronic stress hurts. The inverted U (Yerkes and Dodson, 1908) is old and holds up in outline; chronic stress and its cortisol impair the hippocampus. Grade: well established in outline.
Mindfulness, breathing, reappraisal, exercise, sleep and social support all reduce anxiety by small to moderate amounts in trials; reappraisal, reading the racing heart as readiness rather than failure, is cheap and has direct experimental support (Jamieson and colleagues, 2010, on test-takers). Grade: good evidence for small to moderate effects; none is a substitute for having learned the material.

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation¶

Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory: learning for its own sake goes with deeper processing and persistence; external rewards start behaviour and can crowd out interest if kept up. Grade: good evidence. What to do: find why the material matters to you (Zakrajsek's value), choose what and how you learn where you can, seek the band between bored and frustrated, and track progress, since visible progress is its own reward. Curiosity's effect on memory has a dopamine story on brain chemistry; the advice does not depend on it.

Po polsku, w skrócie¶

Wiara, że zdolności rosną, wiara, że dasz radę z tym zadaniem, i umiarkowany stres: wszystko to ma znaczenie, ale podsumowania przesadzają z wielkością efektów. Interwencje nastawienia na rozwój (Dweck) poprawiają oceny trochę, głównie u uczniów, którym idzie źle; poczucie własnej skuteczności (Bandura) ma mocniejsze dowody i cztery źródła: własne sukcesy, sukcesy podobnych osób, zachęta i to, jak czytamy własną tremę. Syndrom oszusta to uczucie, nie dowód; lekarstwem jest zapis wyników. Stres w chwili odpowiedzi psuje przypominanie, ale materiał nauczony przez sprawdzanie się z pamięci przetrwa stres, którego nie przetrwa materiał tylko przeczytany. Dwie pułapki: własne porażki tłumaczymy okolicznościami, cudze charakterem; a swój udział w sukcesie pamiętamy jako większy, niż był.