Growth Mindset

In Self Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a philosopher part of the Transcendentalism reform says, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world”. This stresses the importance of having an honest mind, and how being accepting of your mistakes allows for growth. Having a growth mindset means that when faced with failure or difficulty, you are able to learn from that experience instead of giving up. The growth mindset has been proven to affect academic performance, and can be used to close the achievement gap that exists in socioeconomic groups. Currently, there exists a vast academic achievement gap in higher education between minority, low income students
However, when a program was introduced to target “disadvantaged students”, students with the highest percent of not graduating college, and enrolling them into support groups, the results were astonishing: “the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mindset messages did significantly better... They had cut the gap between themselves and the advantaged students in half.” These findings have important implications for the broader domain of support systems college institutions provide to aid students at risk of not graduating, by improving this, it will enable students to be more likely to
In the article "Failing Still to Address Poverty Directly: Growth Mindset as Deficit Ideology" he explains, “the media, the public, and educators often fail to acknowledge two significant flaw with growth mindset... the larger failure to see the need to address poverty directly instead of indirectly through formal education.” Thus, in this case, the growth mindset is not properly implemented in the education system and the reason why low income, minority students are performing worse academically is due to the poor quality of education they