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MINDSET AND SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT Let's step down from the celestial realm of Mozart and Darwin and come back to earth to see how mindsets create achievement in real life. It's funny but seeing one student blossom under the growth mindset has a greater impact on me than all the stories about Mozarts and Darwins. Maybe because it's more about you and me about what's happened to us and why we are where we are now. And about children and their potential.Back on carth, we measured students' mindsets as they made the transition to junior high school: Did they believe their intelligence was a fixed trait of something they could develop? Then we followed them for the next two years The transition to junior high is a time of great challenge for many students. The work gets much harder, the grading policies toughen up, the teaching becomes less personalized And all this happens while students are coping with their new adolescent bodies and roles Grades suffer, but not everyone's grades suffer equally. No In our study, only the students with the fixed mindset showed the decline The students with the growth mindset showed an increase in their grades over the two years When the two groups had entered junior high, their past records were indistinguishable In the more benign environment of grade school, they d earned the same grades and achievement test scores Only when they hit the challenge of junior high did they begin to pull apart Here's how students with the fixed mindset explained their poor grades. Many maligned their abilities: "I am the stupidest" or "I suck in math." And many covered these feelings by blaming someone else: "[The math teacher] is a fat male slut and the English teacher] is a slob with a pink ***" "Because the teacher is on crack. These interesting analyses of the problem hardly provide a road map to future success With the threat of failure looming, students with the growth mindset instead mobilized their resources for learning They told us that they, too, sometimes felt overwhelmed, but their response was to dig in and do what it takes. They were like George Danzig. Who? George Danzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved