Mindset

QW: Describe a time you had to do something difficult.  How did you go about it?

Background Information:
Over the past decade or so, our ideas of how the mind works have changed drastically.  Many people used to believe that intelligence was a relatively fixed quantity, something that couldn't change substantially.  People also used to believe that once you achieved adulthood (indeed, shortly after you left your toddler years), you were stuck with the brain you had, and it wouldn't really change much over the course of the rest of your life.

Recent research has changed all of this.  Neuroscientists have discovered that in pre-adolescence and adolescence, the brain goes through a period of rapid growth in neural connections, followed by pruning of unused connections, similar to what happens with toddlers (for more information on this, see this article). This makes adolescence an incredibly important time for learning.  The neural connections that are used repeatedly will be kept and strengthened, those that are not used will be lost.  The implications are that this is the most efficient time to learn something - if you want to learn a language or how to play a musical instrument, for example, it will be much harder once this period of growth and pruning is over.

Another recent area of research is concerned with how students think about learning.  Researchers at Stanford have looked at how mindset, or how students think about their ability to learn, affects their academic success.  These attitudes are characterized as fixed mindset or growth mindset.  People with a fixed mindset think that intelligence or ability is something that is more or less pre-determined, and can't be changed much.  Those with a growth mindset, however, believe that through effort and meaningful feedback, people can improve their intelligence and abilities.  Current neurological research strongly supports the second idea - as we learn new things, new connections (called synapses) are actually created in our brains; that is, our brains actually change physically as a result of our learning.

Activity:
Read the following articles on learning and mindset:

Student's View of Intelligence Can Help Grades
Forget Talent: Why Practice is Key to Most Prodigies' Success

Then answer the questions on this Google Doc: Growth Mindset Reading Questions

You can learn more about the idea of a growth mindset here or here, and a ton of information on how mindset affects performance in math particularly at Jo Boler's Youcubed website.