Progressfocused

The Correspondent published an interesting Dutch article by Rutger Bregman entitled Zes tekenen dat je aan de verkeerde kant van de geschiedenis staat (Six signs that you are on the wrong side of history). Here I mention some highlights from the article in the hope that you will read the article yourself afterwards.

Progress monitoring can be a powerful countermeasure to the negativity bias . We almost always start our training sessions with a start up exercise. This is a short exercise, usually about 10 minutes, that we usually do in pairs. During the exercise, we always give the participants a concrete question to discuss. A question that is regularly used is: “Take turns telling each other about meaningful progress you have made in the past period.” I often remain surprised at how well this question works and how beneficial it is.

Description of a study by Clegg et al. (2022) on the predictors and correlates of autonomous motivation and controlled motivation. In other words: how good motivation is created and what effects it has.

A growth mindset is the belief that abilities can change. Having a growth mindset is beneficial for motivation and seeking challenges. But more and more researchers are concerned about the existence of a false growth mindset. Does it indeed exist? If so, what are its meaning, causes and relevance?

A school is launching a project aimed at improving students' self-regulation skills. The aim is that students learn to concentrate better, to persevere in the face of adversity, and to use various strategies to achieve their goals. Over time, researchers find that the learning performance of the students improves on average. So the project appears to be a success. However, to their surprise, they also see that the students do not feel that their self-regulation skills have improved. The school management and the researchers are scratching their heads. What is going on here? A publication by Lira et al. (2022) offers an explanation.

There are two new publications on the effects of growth mindset interventions. The two articles analyze the same research literature via meta-analyses, but draw completely different conclusions. Macnamara & Burgoyne (2022) argue that growth mindset interventions hardly work; Burnette et al. (2022) found positive effects on academic outcomes, mental health and social functioning. How can this be? There is a simple and important explanation described in an article by Tipton et al (2022). 

It seems logical: when you come to new insights, you are happy. But it is often a bit more complicated. It often happens that we can have mixed feelings when we come to a new insight. How is that possible? 

Mindset interventions can help students change their beliefs about themselves and their experiences in their studies. They can help students develop a learning mindset that makes them believe they can be successful, fit in, and that the education is relevant to them. Until now, mindset interventions in studies have not focused on the context of a specific study (e.g. biology). In addition, the interventions were usually designed and delivered by psychologists. A new study ( Hecht et al., 2022 ) used an approach of modified peer-modeled mindset interventions. 

Recently I wrote an article on a paper in Science by Nicolas Light et al. (2022) . The article showed that people who disagree most with the scientific consensus on topics such as climate change, vaccination and evolution have less knowledge about these topics than people who believe in the scientific consensus when they think they know more about it. They have an illusion of understanding . In other words, they have a high subjective knowledge (this is your own judgment of how much you know) but a low objective knowledge (this is how much you actually know). Two interesting questions arose about that article. You can read those questions and my answers below.