Peter has recently received his school report, which shows great improvement. His teacher states that he has improved because he has put more effort into his work. Evaluate Dweck's theory using Peter's case.

Carol Dweck’s mindset theory suggests that people fall into one of two categories (or mindsets). Those with a growth mindset believe that through hard work and effort, they can improve themselves and their intelligence as personality and intelligence are fluid and can be grown. Those with a fixed mindset, on the other hand, believe personality and intelligence are fixed (and often genetic), and therefore value overall achievement over effort.

Firstly, if Peter is indeed putting in more effort into his work, and so making progress, it can be assumed that he has a growth mindset and that this is what is allowing him do so well in his studies because there is a correlation between how much effort he is putting into his studies and how much progress he is making. This would support Dweck’s theory, as it appears to be directly supporting her ideas about the growth mindset being a more positive mindset to have when trying to learn.

However, it could also be argued that Peter’s progress is in fact not at all linked to his effort but rather to his proficiency (or natural ability) in learning or utilising the topics he has been taught, due to, as an example, his genetics. There is a strong case that it is in fact genetics that play a larger role in intelligence than Dweck’s mindsets, as evidenced by a metastudy, or compilation of many studies and experiments by Bouchard and McGue (1981), which looked at the IQ scores of people who shared various percentages of DNA and who were reared either together in the same environment or apart, to see whether there would be a correlation between genetics and IQ similarity. This metastudy showed that identical twins, even when reared apart, had very similar IQs, more similar than siblings reared together or apart and much more similar than distant family members reared together or apart, which counters Dweck’s theory that intelligence is something that is environmental and fluid and not genetically fixed, because it shows that DNA determines at least some part of our intelligence.

One might argue, however, that some aspects of Bouchard and McGue, along with studies by, for example, Gunderson (2013), support Dweck’s theory. This is because though Bouchard and McGue showed correlation between genetics and intelligence, there were still differences even between identical twins reared together and reared apart, with those reared together showing on average more similarity in intelligence. This is significant because that difference can be accounted for by environmental factors, for example the type of praise the twins got from their parents or teachers, which is another key aspect of Dweck’s theory. Dweck believed that praising a child’s effort will eventually make them adapt a growth mindset, while praising a child’s achievement will make them adopt a fixed mindset. Part of this theory can be supported by Gunderson 2013, in which a double blind study where neither the participants nor the invigilator knew the objective, attempted to link the type of praise a child received (either effort or achievement praise) to their mindset 5 years on. The study showed that children who received a lot of effort praise were more likely to develop a growth mindset, which supports Dweck’s theory and could show that environment, particularly praise from elders (like praise from Peter’s teacher or parent causing him to try to put in more effort), can have an impact on mindsets and therefore, in Dweck’s eyes, possible achievement in the future. Yet Gunderson’s study also has a major weakness: the fact that since it’s a natural experiment, there is no IV to control and therefore there is no proof of cause and effect between types of praise and mindset, in short, it lacks internal validity, and shows that Dweck’s theory may be weak because it does not have strong supporting evidence with conclusive results.

Despite Gunderson’s findings, using Dweck’s theory to explain Peter’s achievement could be a flawed idea as not only he but also the teacher has her own biases towards understanding how people learn. For example, the teacher could have heard Dweck’s theory and as a result seen a correlation between Peter’s effort and his improvement that simply did not exist, due to her own bias for and agreements with Dweck. Peter could simply be more proficient at the topic he is learning, due to genetic intelligence or other factors like having been previously exposed to the knowledge elsewhere, which means that like Gunderson’s study, Peter’s case does not have conclusive cause and effect between effort and achievement and thus using Dweck’s theory is overall quite weak.

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