Research Article Summary: Addressing Achievement Gaps With Psychological Interventions by David Yeager

Research Article Summary
Addressing Achievement Gaps with Psychological Interventions by David Yeager,

Gregory Walton, and Geoffrey Cohen, Phi Delta Kappan, volume 96, pages 19-26,
February 2013.
Written by Alison Lee, Teachers College Columbia University
When talking about motivation in the classroom, the emphasis is often placed on
instructional quality: how can we teach more effectively? How can we more deeply
engage students? How do we reach struggling or disengaged students?
While these questions are important and worthy of consideration, educators should
also consider the student’s perspective and experiences in the classroom - how
welcomed and accepted does the student feel in the classroom? What is his/her
attitude towards learning, and towards their own abilities? What are their concerns
and experiences? By taking a student-centered approach, the psychology of
motivation reveals a variety of psychological constructs that underlie student
behavior and beliefs that can then be targeted by classroom interventions. In their
article Yeager et al. outline the various constructs that drive student motivation,
and how timely, stealthy interventions can help augment student effort and
classroom instruction.
Student Motivation: Mindset, Belonging, and Reframing Feedback
First, here are several concepts that underlie student motivation. Carol Dweck’s
seminal work on growth mindset shows that student beliefs about their own ability
and intelligence can largely influence their willingness to engage in effortful
learning. Students who believe that their intelligence is fixed and cannot change,
called a fixed mindset, find it hard to stay motivated when they struggle in their
classwork. They believe that their struggles are indicative of an overall ineptitude -
“I’m just not good at math, I’ll never get it” - and so are unmotivated to persist in
their efforts. On the other hand, teaching students that intelligence and ability can
be developed with strategic effort, called a growth mindset, can help students
reframe struggles as an opportunity to grow, rather than a sign of inability. Dweck’s
studies that directly targeted cultivating growth mindset showed improvements to
student achievement, including low-income and minority students.
The second construct surrounding student motivation is that of social belonging.

Students bring in a wide variety of beliefs about their identities, and the kinds of
stereotypes and expectations that are built into them. For example, students who
have negative academic stereotypes associated with their identities (for example,
girls, or black and Latino students in STEM fields) may worry about whether their
teachers expect them to excel less, or feel left out, dismissed or marginalized by
their peers. These anxieties over belonging can lead to long-term stress and
decrease student motivation over time.
Yeager et al. outline two ways teachers can address these concerns of social
belonging and stress. The first social belonging intervention is to convey to students
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that their concerns and anxieties about belonging are not unique to them - almost
all students worry about feeling like they belong, and that these worries will fade
over time. By highlighting that all students grapple with feelings of belonging, and
by reassuring that these anxieties are short term, students may feel less
marginalized and isolated in their struggles.
The second way to address social belonging is to take a values affirmation

approach. Values affirmation interventions asks students to reflect on the values
that drive their sense of purpose and belonging (such as their cultural and religious
values, their personal relationships, or their personal pursuits and aspirations),
during a particularly stressful time(s) of the year. These reflections help students
reaffirm their sense of belonging, and can boost the GPAs of students who grapple
with negative stereotypes in both adolescence and college.
The third concept underlying student motivation is their perception of fairness and
rigor in class expectations and standards. Students, especially those facing negative
stereotypes, may worry or suspect that a teacher is unfairly harsh or biased against
them. They might mistrust whether a teacher’s feedback or evaluation is a genuine
reflection of their work, or if it's a product of a teacher’s bias against their group.
By promoting the idea that critical, constructive feedback is a sign of a teacher’s
confidence in a student’s potential to reach high standards, teachers can help
students reframe their concerns that the feedback is biased or unfair. Interventions
that reframe feedback as a sign of high standards boosted urban black youths’
GPAs and reduced the achievement gap months after the intervention.
Psychological Interventions: Implementation
These psychological interventions, which can be low cost, take comparably little
time, and are relatively simple to implement, can disrupt traditional breakdowns in
student motivation and positively impact achievement in both the short and long
term. However, despite their powerful potential, these interventions can only be
impactful if they’re carefully, subtly, and effectively delivered—in the words of
Yeager et al. using “stealthy approaches.” Unlike prescribed lesson plans or
workbooks to be filled out, these psychological interventions are only effective if
they are delivered in ways that can substantially and authentically change how
students think about themselves, their classroom, and their performance.
Furthermore, they cannot alleviate deficits in student performance due to larger
systemic issues in their environment, such as poverty or neighborhood trauma.
Construal. A student-centered approach to psychological interventions means

taking on the perspective of each student - their anxieties, their beliefs, and their
interpretations of interactions with peers and teachers. In other words, teachers
must not only make observations of the classroom environment and interactions as
they appear, but also consider how these elements are construed by their students.
For example, consider a student that worries about how a bad grade might impact
her: it could be construed as a sign that she’s not smart enough, or it might make
her anxious about how her peers see her. Reinforcing the idea that a poor grade is
an opportunity to improve, or that the negative feedback means the teacher
believes in her potential be do better, can be an effective way to reframe the way
your students approach academic tasks.
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Psychologically wise delivery. Because these interventions ask for a shift in the way
students perceive or understand themselves and their environment, rather than
acquisition of complex knowledge (like math or language arts), psychological
interventions need to be subtle, varied, and promote internalization of the ideas. It
isn’t sufficient to simply deliver direct messages about mindset, belonging, and
feedback; as teachers quickly realize, students have a hard time internalizing ideas
if they aren’t asked to deeply process or explain them. Rather, each of the
interventions described are rooted in a delivery mechanism that help students
internalize and deeply process these ideas. For example, growth mindset
interventions take advantage of the “saying-is-believing” effect by having students
write letters to younger students about growth mindset. Furthermore, these
interventions need to be subtle and varied. Lecturing about the benefits of
belonging in the classroom, or verbal reassurances that teacher feedback in
unbiased, might feel controlling and alienate students from the original intention, or
worse, make students feel as though they need help more than others. Worse,
excessive repetition may come across as a “canned response”, and therefore
undermine the credibility and sincerity of a reassuring message. In short, these
psychological interventions require a subtle, nuanced approach that gets students
to deeply internalize these ideas, and shift the way they approach both their own
academic processes and the classroom.
Recursive processes. It might seem confounding, maybe even “too-good-to-be-

true”, that these psychological interventions can impact so many dimensions of
student achievement and attitudes, in both the short and long term. Yet, we often
see that students’ early experiences and attitudes can translate into self-reinforcing
cycles as they progress through school. For example, students who might make
more friends early on might feel more confident that they belong in their school,
which in turn translates into more confidence and closer relationships with teachers,
which in turn translates into receiving greater support and encouragement to
succeed. Conversely, students who might start off feeling uneasy and unaccepted
by their peers might feel less welcome to contribute to class discussions or ask for
help, which translates into less support or encouragement from the classroom,
which translates into disengagement from academic tasks. These recursive cycles
happen both over the course of a school year, and over the long term trajectory of
a child’s education. Because of this, it is critically important to intervene early in the
cycles or at a critical stage to improve the long-term trajectory of student attitudes,
beliefs and performance.
Well-Meaning Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Many teachers may have already heard of these constructs and implemented their
own ways to address them in their own classrooms. Yet, psychological
interventions differ from most academic interventions - they require subtlety and
are vulnerable to many possible mistakes - psychological researchers can attest to
that. Yeager and his colleagues discuss some of the more common mistakes
educators make, and how to avoid them.
When encouraging students to persist through setbacks, a common refrain is to “try

again”. Yet, “more effort” oftentimes is insufficient for skill development - a good
strategy or response is required to improve. If students are only encouraged to give
more effort without an effective plan or strategy, they might continue to experience
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failures even with increased effort and therefore become despondent and
demotivated. Growth mindset interventions teach that success comes from effort +
strategy + help from others, and teacher encouragement should also include
identifying effective strategies to address student performance, and give or seek
help when needed.
Another common mistake is delivering psychological interventions as generic, one-

size-fits-all lessons that don’t feel sincere, personal, or taken seriously. For
example, generally touting that “everyone belongs here” without making students
feel personally valued and respected won’t fool anyone. Instead, helping poor-
performing students acknowledge their worries about belonging are common and
fade with time can more tangibly and subtly ease student anxieties.
A third common mistake teachers make is overpraising student effort. Often in an

attempt to boost student confidence and appear biased, teachers bestow praise to
students for mediocre performance, especially students who belong in stereotyped
or marginalized groups. Other times, teachers, will deliberately praise student
ability with phrases such as “You’re so smart!” Yet this can actually undermine
effort or high expectations, as this may convey to students that the bar set for
praiseworthy performance is lower for them (for the former), or reinforce that only
ability, rather than effort and strategy, is praiseworthy (for the latter).
While the constructs of belonging, mindset, and high standards are not new to
educators, sometimes even the most well intended interventions might go awry. On
the other hand, researchers may lack the nuanced subtlety and experience to make
these interventions sink in most effectively for students in a given class.
Furthermore, many of the findings from psychological and educational research
started from real-world success stories, from teachers like you, who found effective
and innovative ways to reach their students. Yeager and his colleagues conclude
that there must be two sets of collaboration moving forward; first, a deeper
collaboration between researchers and teachers to work together to both
investigate and implement changes in the classroom to change students’
motivations and attitudes for the better; and second, a collaborative effort to
integrate both psychological and academic interventions to improve both student
motivation and learning outcomes.

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Research Article Summary

Addressing Achievement Gaps with Psychological Interventions by David Yeager,

Written by Alison Lee, Teachers College Columbia University

Student Motivation: Mindset, Belonging, and Reframing Feedback

The second construct surrounding student motivation is that of social belonging.

The second way to address social belonging is to take a values affirmation

Psychological Interventions: Implementation

Construal. A student-centered approach to psychological interventions means

Recursive processes. It might seem confounding, maybe even “too-good-to-be-

Well-Meaning Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

When encouraging students to persist through setbacks, a common refrain is to “try

Another common mistake is delivering psychological interventions as generic, one-

A third common mistake teachers make is overpraising student effort. Often in an

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