Scaling Up Social Psychological Interventions: Effects on Grade Point Average and Course Pass Rates in a Sample of Low-Achieving Students at 13 High Schools

• In Event: Increasing Students’ Academic Motivation Through Social-Psychological Interventions

Abstract

This paper presents a method we created to scale up social psychological interventions in schools. Several rigorous, but small-scale, social psychological interventions have demonstrated that changing the way that students’ think about school and their own abilities can have powerful influences on their motivation and achievement. For example, interventions that teach students a growth mindset, the belief that intelligence is malleable, have resulted in higher grade point averages and standardized test scores. Similarly, interventions that help students understand the relevance or purpose of their schoolwork have shown improvements in students’ grades in science courses and in the number of sciences courses taken. However, there are questions about the generalizability and practicality of such interventions due to small sample sizes and heavy involvement of researchers. In order for social psychological interventions to reach their promise, they must be evaluated on a much larger scale and by practitioners instead of researchers. In the present study, 1594 students from 13 different high schools completed a growth mindset intervention, a sense-of-purpose intervention, both, or control exercises. Students who had pre-intervention grade point averages in the bottom third of the sample, earned higher grades and were more likely to pass their courses if they were in one of the three treatment groups compared those in the control group. This intervention was delivered in the computer lab over the course of 2 45-minute sessions with little involvement from researchers and suggests the promise of social psychological interventions to affect achievement on a wide scale.

Authors

• Carissa Romero, Stanford University

• David Paunesku, Stanford University

• Carol Dweck, Stanford University

• Gregory Mariotti Walton, Stanford University

• David Scott Yeager, Stanford University