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Emile comments on [Link] Why the kids don’t know no algebra - Less Wrong Discussion
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Erase the difference, are you sure? I agree that it's pretty likely that the growth mindset is more beneficial than the fixed mindset, but is there any evidence that the addiitional benefit of the growth mindset doesn't improve smart kids as much as it improves dumb kids (on average!), leaving a difference still there?
(Your link is broken btw)
I was surprised by that too -- is the growth mindset not that helpful for smart children?
I suspect that somehow the message "the other kids will catch up with you" got across, and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or the lessons were focused on the parts where the slower kids could catch up, ignoring the parts where the faster kids could get further ahead.
I don't think many researchers and educators are actually claiming that things like adopting the growth mindset will "close the gap" - that would be a spin added by journalists, etc.
I get somewhat when I read about "closing the gap" as a goal of education; it gives the impression that a policy that improves all children is strictly worse than a policy that improves only stupid children by the same amount.
Well, equality is one of the human values. I think the journalists are adding this spin because readers want to read it; because it is a political topic. Saying that one child leaves the school system smarter than the other child makes people think "that's unfair". And being unfair, especially towards children, is a bad thing. So yes, a policy that improves all children is strictly worse at creating a feeling of equality.
(Of course there are other values besides equality, which shouldn't be sacrificed, unless you want to say things like: "No one should be able to find a cure for cancer, until we all are able to find a cure for cancer... which realistically means: never." But this is exactly the mindkilling effect of politics: focus on one value and ignore all the others, because our team identifies with this value, and the other value is used in the same way by the other team.)
That's a good point, I'm not sure that any research shows long-term convergence among students. I may have overstated the point. I guess what I was thinking was that in the long run, all students would improve so much as to make any initial differences unimportant (which may or may not be the case, but it can't be assumed)
Edit: yeah, I can't seem to fix the link, the bracket at the end seems to be screwing it up. Anyone know how to fix it?
You need to use escape characters instead of brackets, like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset_%28book%29
Note that when I copy a URL from Firefox's address bar, the brackets are automatically escaped (I can just paste the result); but when I right-click on a link and select "Copy Link Location", the brackets aren't escaped, and I get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset_(book).