Promoting Growth Mindset in Middle School Students: An Intervention using Read-Alouds

Abstract

The benefits of having a growth mindset have been extensively studied. The idea of “growth mindset” has become an established concept within American schools. The most current task in this area is figuring out how to create interventions that will promote this important growth mindset amongst students. The purpose of this study was to examine whether reading books out loud to a group of students (ages 10 to 12) could promote growth mindset. Read-alouds focused on specific mindset-related character traits and used those as an intervention to promote or increase growth mindset. Results showed that the read-aloud intervention was not effective in increasing students’ growth mindset or specific character strengths. In addition, findings did not support the proposed correlations between character strengths and growth mindset.