These children didn’t shy away from error they confronted and engaged with it. They understood that their abilities could be developed, that they are not limited to the “now”. These children had what Dweck defines as a “ growth mindset“. “They said things like, ‘I love a challenge,’ or, ‘You know, I was hoping this would be informative’”. “Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way”, explains Dweck.

In one of her studies within this area, Dweck wanted to explore how children responded to a challenge that was deliberately intended to be too hard for them. But if you get the grade “Not Yet” you understand that you’re on a learning curve.

If you get a failing grade, you think, I’m nothing, I’m nowhere. Carol Dweck explains the power of “Not Yet”: Students are expected to pass a certain number of classes to graduate, but in the event that they do not pass they are simply awarded the alternative grade of “Not Yet”. In her TED talk, “ The Power of Believing You Can Improve”, she describes a school in Chicago with an unorthodox and progressive approach to student assessment. At THG Accelerator, we teach and promote a growth mindset equipping our graduates with the ability to contextualise their learning and maintain perspective as they continue to learn and grow as software engineers.ĭr Carol Dweck, a prominent psychologist at Stanford University, is famous for her pioneering research on motivation and personality, which centres primarily on the opposing concepts of fixed versus growth mindsets. Every budding programmer will at times feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the task that they have undertaken and the sheer magnitude of all that they do not (yet) know. Feeling panicked by the fact that you seemingly know nothing is, of course, natural. Learning how to code, as with learning anything worthwhile for the first time, is hard.

The power of yet carol s dweck