Having a positive mindset in math may do more than just help students feel more confident about their skills and more willing to keep trying when they fail; it may prime their brains to think better.
In an ongoing series of experiments at Stanford University, neuroscientists have found more efficient brain activity during math thinking in students with a positive mindset about math.
It's part of a growing effort to map the biological underpinnings of what educators call a positive or growth mindset, in which a student believes intelligence or other skills can be improved with training and practice, rather than being fixed and inherent traits.
"Our findings provide strong evidence that a positive mindset contributes to children's math competence," said Lang Chen, a Stanford University postdoctoral fellow in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. "Beyond the emotional or even motivational story of 'positive mindset,' there may be cognitive functions supporting the story."
Seeing a Mind in the Brain
In a forthcoming study previewed at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Chicago in October, Chen and colleagues tested 243 children ages 7 to 9 for intelligence, numerical problem-solving and math reasoning in word problems, reading ability, working memory, and math-anxiety levels. Chen also gave the students a survey designed to identify positive-mindset levels in math, such as questions about how much they enjoyed solving challenging problems and how competent they felt in learning math.
The researchers focused on math because other studies have found that a student's mindset can be different for different domains—he or she could believe that reading ability can be improved but that skill at soccer is innate, for example—and math is a subject often associated with a fixed mindset.
Of the children in the study, 47 were asked to either stare at a fixed point or identify whether a series of addition problems were correct while being scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, a noninvasive method of identifying brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow in the brain.
Chen and his colleagues found that students with higher positive-mindset levels in math were more accurate at identifying correct and incorrect math problems, even after controlling for differences in IQ, age, working memory, reading ability, and math anxiety.
A lower positive-mindset level was likewise associated with lower math performance.
"This is very, very exciting," said Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who first coined the terms "growth" and "fixed" mindsets, but who was not involved with Chen's study. "We've typically asked how does [mindset] affect students' willingness to take on challenges and their ability to stick to that challenge when they hit setbacks. This opens up a whole new area, which is getting ready to solve a problem. ...
Dweck said that pattern aligns with separate findings by Bruce McCandliss, a Stanford education professor not associated with Chen's study, who found differences in the brains of people who perform better at solving math problems, but had not looked at whether those differences were related to mindset. ...
Chen and his colleagues are in the middle of a larger, longitudinal study tracking how 60 students' attitudes and underlying brain activity change as they grow from age 7 to 12. The researchers are trying to identify differences in students' mindsets and performance if they started out performing generally well or poorly in math.
Separately, the researchers are also working with Jo Boaler, a Stanford math education professor and a co-founder of Youcubed, an intervention to improve growth-mindset levels in math.
Read the entire article on Edweek's website.
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