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Key points
- Researchers developed an educational intervention that teaches a growth mindset and a stress-can-be-helpful mindset for teens.
- This intervention reduces adverse cognitive and physiological reactions to stress.
- The stress intervention works best for teens who previously had a fixed mindset and believed stress is debilitating.
The teen years are generally recognized as being a stressful time of life. The past few years have compounded the stress of getting an education, becoming independent, and developing social skills with navigating a global pandemic. Any tool that might help adolescents to handle these stresses effectively would be welcome.
A 2022 paper in Nature by David Yeager, Christopher Bryan, James Gross, Jared Murray, Danielle Krettek Cobb, Pedro Santos, Hannah Gravelding, Meghann Johnson, and Jeremy Jamieson suggest a simple educational intervention that is effective.
The intervention is based on two kinds of mindsets. The first is the familiar growth mindset that Carol Dweck and her colleagues developed. A growth mindset reflects that most things (including intelligence) have a significant skill component that you can improve with practice. A key element of promoting a growth mindset is the recognition that academic difficulties can be treated as an invitation to put in the effort to develop new capacities.
The second mindset focuses on the benefits of stress. While people often think of stress as debilitating, a moderate amount of stress can provide energy to engage with challenges. Students can learn to channel that energy to pursue their goals.
The authors developed a 30-minute educational module that presents information about both of these types of mindsets. As a control, they developed a second module that presents information about the brain and the physiology of stress but does not talk about information related to growth mindsets or the benefits of stress.
In a series of studies, high school and college students were used as participations. They were given a baseline measure to determine whether they held a fixed mindset about academics and whether they thought stress was debilitating. This measure was used because these mindset interventions ought to be more effective for people who previously held a fixed mindset and felt that the effects of stress were largely negative.
The studies looked at various measures to determine this mindset's influence on education. Two studies looked at how students thought about themselves after experiencing a stressor like having to give a public presentation of their work in front of classmates. Compared to those in the control condition, students given the mindsets education rated the stressor less threatening. This effect held up even several weeks after the education intervention.
Other studies explored physiological reactions to stress, such as the construction of constriction of blood vessels in the limbs. Participants engaged in a stressful academic task and were measured throughout the experience. Those given the mindset intervention displayed fewer physiological signs of stress than those in the control condition.
Another study asked participants to complete daily surveys of whether they experienced stressful events that day and measures of their stress levels about two weeks after getting the education intervention. Participants who received the mindset interventions reported lower stress levels on stressful days than those in the control condition. Participants in this study also did better in their math and science courses (often stressful for students) when they were in the mindset intervention condition than in the control condition.
There are two other findings worth pointing out here. First, the biggest influence of the mindset interventions was found for those students who previously held a fixed mindset and thought stress was harmful to their performance. That is, the mindset interventions helped those who most needed that help. Second, the combination of mindset interventions is key. Some of the studies gave students none, one, or both of the mindset interventions. Decreases in stress response were observed only for those students who got both interventions, suggesting they are both necessary.
These results are quite promising. The mindset intervention is only 30 minutes long but influences performance long after it is presented. A brief intervention like this could be given to students on a large scale without interfering with the many other topics students need to learn. In addition, there weren’t obvious groups of students whose performance was harmed by the intervention.
Finally, the studies involved students from diverse backgrounds, suggesting that the intervention is broadly valuable.
References
Yeager, D.S., Bryan, C.J., Gross, J.J. et al. A synergistic mindsets intervention protects adolescents from stress. Nature (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04907-7
