Carol Dweck

Carol Susan Dweck was born on October 17, 1946, in New York City. In sixth grade at P.S. 153 in Brooklyn, her teacher seated the class in order of IQ scores and reserved certain privileges, like carrying the flag and erasing the blackboard, for the highest-scoring students.1

Decades later, Dweck would develop the theoretical framework that explained what that classroom was teaching. Not math or reading, but a belief about the nature of ability itself.

Dweck's research, conducted across appointments at the University of Illinois, Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford, distinguished between two implicit theories of intelligence. People who hold an "entity theory," which she later renamed a fixed mindset, believe that intelligence is a stable trait. People who hold an "incremental theory," later renamed a growth mindset, believe that intelligence can be developed through effort and strategy.2

The terminology first appeared in a 1988 paper co-authored with Ellen Leggett in Psychological Review. Dweck popularized the concepts in her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which became a global bestseller.3

Her findings showed that students who believed intelligence was malleable outperformed those who believed it was fixed, particularly in the face of difficulty. In intervention studies, teaching students that the brain forms new connections through challenging work produced measurable improvements in academic performance, especially among struggling students.4

Dweck was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and received the Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2017, carrying a total award of approximately 3.9 million dollars.5 She holds the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professorship of Psychology at Stanford. In a 2015 essay revisiting her own work, Dweck warned against what she called "false growth mindset," the tendency for educators to adopt the language without changing their practices, telling students to try harder without teaching them new strategies.6