Abstract
Mindset is a person’s belief about human attributes, such as intelligence. People with a growth mindset believe that their intelligence is malleable and can be developed and people with a fixed mindset believe that their intelligence is innate and unalterable. Somebody’s mindset is not a state of mind, it is
... read more
more a trait that can be changed over time, due to life experiences, influences from teachers, parents, siblings, and peers, or with targeted interventions. Mindset interventions have been shown to be an effective approach for improving academic achievement, adopting a growth mindset not only leads to greater academic achievement, but also to an increase in students’ motivation. The general aim of the studies presented in this thesis was to investigate whether a mindset intervention could be beneficial for the motivation and academic achievement of students in Vocational Education and Training (VET). Although, in general, Dutch students perform rather well, many VET students are not sufficiently motivated to learn. Previous studies have shown that they give up too quickly and avoid difficult problems. Therefore, improving students’ motivation is one of the main challenges for VET in the Netherlands. First, we started with an exploration of VET students’ mindsets to investigate whether findings from previous research could be extrapolated to VET. Second, we compared the findings from the first study with student’s mindsets in general secondary education. Next, we examined the effectiveness of an earlier proven effective mindset intervention in a 10-week mathematic course in VET. Because these first three studies were not in line with the results as described in literature, we wanted to examine why findings from previous research were not found in VET. Therefore, we went back to one of the basic assumptions of mindset theory; the effectiveness of different kinds of praise. Praise for intelligence is expected to have more negative consequences for students’ motivation and achievement when compared to praise for effort. In the fourth study we therefore investigated the effects of different kinds of praise on VET students. Although we used a similar design as the original mindset studies, our results were still not in line with these previous studies. Because mindset interventions might be especially beneficial for students at-risk, in our fifth study we repeated our fourth study with VET students at-risk. Again, our results were not in line with previous studies supporting the mindset theory. Although we were not able to replicate findings from prior research with VET students, our results are in line with an increasing body of literature that also does not succeed in finding a relation between mindset and academic achievement. This thesis contributes to the attempts to gain more insight into who does benefit from mindset interventions and how we can make mindset interventions more effective for students. In this thesis we postulated three possible explanations for the lack of effectiveness of mindset interventions for VET students: cultural influences, the (higher) age of our participants, and a ceiling effect of growth mindset and mindset interventions.
show less
