The study states that teachers with a growth mindset appear more appreciated than warmth. But if you look at how those teachers are described, it seems to be exactly what I understand as high expectations, as they are described as teachers who feel that the student’s ability in a subject could improve by working hard and trying different strategies.  The question now is: why not both?

From the press release:

Students tend to like friendly teachers, but they like those who believe they can improve even more, new research indicates.

Students in a study still responded positively to instructors described as being cold but who also had a growth mindset, meaning they felt students’ ability in a subject could improve by working hard and trying different strategies. The opposite was also true: more participants reacted negatively to a warm, smiling teacher when they stated a fixed mindset, which is a belief that innate abilities cannot be changed, such as someone being naturally good at math.

“It’s not enough to just be nice,” said lead author Makita White, a Washington State University psychology Ph.D. candidate. “If teachers can change their demeanor to be warmer, it does have a good impact, but it’s a lot better to convey a growth mindset than a fixed mindset to students.”

Previous research has noted that students tend to view teachers who have growth mindsets as friendly and warm, so this proof-of-concept study, published in the journal Motivation Science, was designed to evaluate those factors separately.

The study participants still responded best to an instructor described as both friendly and having a growth mindset. However, a “cold” instructor with a growth mindset still saw a greater positive response than a “warm” one with a fixed mindset.

This indicates that teachers might consider their mindset more important than their demeanor, said Elizabeth Canning, a WSU psychology researcher.

“At a very simple level, being friendly is good, but the mindset messages that you send students are really important. They can be even more powerful than just being friendly or welcoming to students,” said Canning, the senior author on the paper.

For this study, researchers presented 332 college students with one of four vignettes describing a statistics professor with different demeanors and mindsets. The students then answered a series of questions about what they thought of the professor and the class they taught, including their comfort level taking the course and how well they thought they would perform.

In the growth mindset scenarios, the professor stated that “any student can learn the material” if they worked hard, learned from mistakes and sought help when needed. In the fixed mindset vignettes, the professor said that some students had “a natural gift in statistics” while other students might struggle if they weren’t a “stats person.”

Whether instructors were described as being “very warm and friendly” or staring blankly and making students nervous, the scenarios that had professors stating a growth mindset had a much more positive response from the students. They reported they would have a greater sense of belonging in the class, lower “imposter” feelings and a better chance of doing well in the course.

Growth mindset is often touted as an advantage in relation to education. However, most prior research has focused on students’ motivational beliefs with only recent attention to the instructors’ mindsets. In addition to this study, Canning’s lab has done work indicating that instructors with growth mindsets can narrow performance gaps for traditionally disadvantaged groups. For instance, instructors with fixed mindsets were found in one study to undermine women’s performance in STEM courses and in another created a greater racial achievement gap than in courses taught by those with growth mindsets.

“When you only focus on the students’ mindset, it can lead to blaming the student, so if they’re not performing well, you can tell yourself that they just don’t have the right mindset,” she said. “By looking at how the mindset of instructors and culture are affecting students, it may take some of the onus off the students themselves. Instead, we can focus more on how we can make the environment motivating and conducive, so that everybody can be successful in that class.”

Abstract of the study:

Students are more motivated and have better college experiences with instructors who express that ability can grow and improve (a growth mindset), compared with instructors who express that ability is fixed and unchangeable (a fixed mindset). Students also have better experiences with warm and friendly instructors, compared to cold and unfriendly instructors. Instructor mindset beliefs (i.e., what information instructors express to students about the nature of ability) and instructor demeanor (i.e., how that information is expressed) have been confounded in previous research. Although these two factors are conceptually distinct, there is often an overlap between them, such that it is unclear if students are responding to an instructor’s apparent mindset beliefs, or the warm demeanor with which the instructor conveys those beliefs. In this study, we manipulated instructor mindset and demeanor using a fully-crossed 2 (Warm vs. Cold) × 2 (Growth vs. Fixed) Design. We found that while students respond best to a combination of a warm demeanor and a growth mindset, a growth mindset is always preferable to a fixed mindset, for warm instructors and cold instructors alike. This means that the positive effects of an instructors’ growth mindset are not entirely driven by being warm and friendly, as some may have assumed, given how confounded these constructs are in the field. Instead, the growth mindset message had a persistent positive effect on students, even when the delivery was cold. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)

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