Scared of failure? Here’s how having a growth mindset can help

The fear of failure is pervasive among Singaporean students, according to psychologists and educators.

Sticking to “safer” subjects and treating more “challenging” ones like the plague, some students even skip exams altogether in severe cases, a psychologist told TODAY recently.

The latest Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) study also found that 72 per cent of Singaporean students are anxious about how others would perceive them when they fail.

This is higher than the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries’ average of 56 per cent.

Responding to Pisa’s findings, the Ministry of Education said it hopes that the new Primary School Leaving Examination scoring system from 2021 will reduce students’ fear of failure and that the removal of academic streams in secondary schools by 2024 will also encourage a “growth mindset” among students.

It noted that 60 per cent of Singapore students now have such a mindset, compared with the OECD average of 63 per cent.

But what is a growth mindset, and how can it kill the fear of failure at its roots?

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck argued that our lives are shaped by two basic mindsets.

Those with a fixed mindset believe that our intelligence is fixed. Every failure threatens to expose this fixed value. Every challenge demands us to validate ourselves: What if others see that I am only this smart?

Those with a growth mindset believe that intelligence can be developed through practice.

Every failure teaches us how to become smarter. Every challenge encourages us to stretch ourselves: How can I become better at this?

PRAISE EFFORT, NOT INTELLIGENCE

In a landmark study with both kindergarteners and fifth graders (aged 10-11), Professor Dweck gave each student 10 manageable IQ questions.

The students excelled and received different types of praise: Either: “That’s a really good score. You must be smart at this” (ability praise), or: “That’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard” (effort praise).

A control group was simply told: “That’s a really good score” (results praise). The findings were remarkable.

When given a choice between a new set of either easy or difficult questions, the ability-praised students stuck to the easy problems.

As Prof Dweck wrote: “The ability praise pushed students right into the fixed mindset… They didn’t want to do anything that could expose their flaws and call into question their talent.”

In contrast, 90 per cent of the effort-praised students wanted the new, challenging problems that they could learn from.

The students were then given a new set of harder questions. As soon as the going got tough, the ability-praised kids reported that they did not enjoy the test. They felt discouraged by the realisation that they weren’t so gifted after all.

On the other hand, the effort-praised kids reported that the more challenging the test, the more fun it was. They felt encouraged by the realisation that they had to put in more effort.

They also did far better in the difficult questions than their ability-praised counterparts. The control group was right in the middle.

The final stage of the study was the most telling.

Prof Dweck asked the students to write anonymous letters to their peers, sharing their experience and their test scores. 40 per cent of the ability-praised students lied about their scores, inflating them to appear more intelligent.

“What’s so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling them they were smart,” Prof Dweck wrote.

“So telling children they are smart, in the end, made them feel dumber and act dumber, but claim they were smarter.”

The study was repeated five more times in different parts of the United States, all with the same finding: A fixed mindset made students fear failure.

The latest Pisa report confirms this in an international context: In virtually all school systems, students with a growth mindset reported less fear of failure than those with a fixed mindset.

Singapore has undertaken preliminary efforts to explore how we can nurture a growth mindset in our local context.

From 2016 to 2019, the National Institute of Education conducted a study on how one Singaporean case school is implementing a growth mindset curriculum, which encourages resilience and learning from productive failure.

Once published, the results will help school leaders develop a growth mindset curriculum unique to their own schools.

CELEBRATE PROGRESS, NOT PERFECTION

Outside the classroom, parents have a role to play too. They can soothe their children’s fear of failure by acknowledging their effort and progress made, instead of slapping on simplistic labels such as “smart” or “stupid” based on their grades.  

Children ought to be rewarded for a growth mindset: Viewing challenges as opportunities to stretch themselves, not as potential sources of public humiliation.

Internationally, students with a growth mindset scored 32 points higher in reading, after accounting for socioeconomic disparities, according to Pisa.

They reported greater motivation to master tasks, attached greater importance to school, set ambitious learning goals, and more likely expected to complete university.

The Pisa report recommended countries to encourage a growth mindset in students by teaching them about the incredible adaptability of the brain, which creates new neural pathways whenever we learn.

In contrast, children with a fixed mindset go through life with a hypersensitivity towards challenges, fearful that their self-worth will quickly evaporate once they encounter failure.

The Pisa report presents Singapore with an opportunity to address our fear-of-failure demons. A fear of failure may motivate some students but, in all school systems studied by Pisa, students reported greater satisfaction with life when they experience a lesser fear of failure.

We should move away from a narrow definition of success as understood from a fixed mindset, in which success belongs to a small circle of gifted achievers.

It is time to adopt a more inclusive understanding of success, one measured by personal effort and not inborn intelligence, by progress and not perfection.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ashton Ng is the 2019 Kuok Family–Lee Kuan Yew Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where he is pursuing a PhD in Chinese History. He became better at managing his fear of failure after adopting a growth mindset.