The Famous Growth Mindset Study Never Measured Grades. A Bigger One Did.

What did the famous praise study measure?

That 1998 study is Mueller and Dweck. It was six experiments, each in a single lab session. It is careful work, and its finding is real.

But look at what it measured. It watched how children acted in the few minutes after a failure. Did they keep going? Did they enjoy it? Did they blame their own ability? It did not look at school grades. It did not follow any child past that one session.

So the study tells us something true about praise in the moment. It does not tell us that mindset raises a report card. Our view is that praising effort over being smart is still worth doing. The praise studies were done in labs and classrooms, not homes. Carrying them into your home is our own step. We think it is a good one. Here is what to say to a struggling child. It also explains why “you’re so smart” is off the list.

Does growth mindset raise grades for a child who struggles?

Later teams pooled many studies to answer that. On average, the answer is: a little. Sisk and colleagues (2018) ran two large reviews. Holding a growth mindset went with slightly better school results. Mindset programs moved achievement only a small amount.

Two more reviews came out in 2023, in the same journal. They do not agree.

• Macnamara and Burgoyne pooled 63 studies. The small effect was no longer clear after a check for unpublished studies. In the best-run studies, they found no clear effect. Effects were bigger when the authors had a money stake in mindset.
• Burnette and colleagues found a small gain when programs were aimed and run well. Even so, their own range for future studies still included zero.

We will not pick a side. The question is open, and you deserve to hear both.

Now the part that matters for your child. In the Sisk review, gains were bigger for children from low-income homes. They were also bigger for students at high risk in school. That result was borderline. A large national experiment points the same way. Yeager and colleagues (2019, Nature) tested 6,320 lower-achieving students in 65 U.S. schools. The plan was registered before the study began, and outside experts ran the analysis. Dweck was one of the authors. Grades in core classes rose a little. But only in schools where students saw taking on a challenge as normal.

So where mindset work helps, it helps mainly the struggling child. The gain is small. And the school around your child shapes whether it shows up at all. Here is the mindset research we hold, and what it does not show.

If mindset is not the lever, what moves the grade?

Here is where we think the system goes wrong. Mindset gets sold to schools and parents as a cheap way to raise scores. A poster, an assembly, a new way to praise. For a struggling learner, that pitch quietly takes the place of the teaching. A belief is not an intervention.

Yeager’s result makes the same point from the other side. The program helped only where the students around them backed it. That is a finding about the setting, not about your child. Telling a struggling child to believe harder hands a school problem to a child.

The same goes for what the adults expect. Jussim and Harber (2005) reviewed 35 years of classroom studies on teacher expectations. Those effects were real but small, and they did not build up over time. Belief from the adults around your child is good. It is not the teaching.

For reading, Galuschka and colleagues (2014) reviewed 22 randomized trials. Phonics teaching was the only approach that showed a clear effect. That is teaching, not belief. Here is why clear, direct teaching matters for a struggling learner.

So do both. Keep the effort words at home. Confidence does not follow competence. It runs alongside it. How your child sees themselves while they work matters. So does the skill they are building. Then ask the school one plain question: what is the teaching plan for this skill? This one-page picture of the mindset studies is a handy thing to bring along.