High school tests the mettle of many teens. Surveys, both informal and scientific, reveal pervasive stress. A poll of more than 35,000 teens, released this spring by the app, After School, found 45 percent felt stressed “all the time.” The American Psychological Association’s earlier 2014 “Stress in America” survey found teens’ school-year stress levels surpassed those of adults. Teens are anxious about many things, but academic stress — from high school GPA to what is widely viewed as a college admissions “arms race” — serves as a perennial pressure point. What helps kids de-stress? Changing how they think about their smarts is a great place to start.
A new child development study shows students’ beliefs about intelligence, following academic failure, predict emotional resilience — or chronic stress, its unhappy alternative. The study, conducted by University of Texas-Austin researchers, tracked 499 ninth-graders. Two-thirds experienced a GPA drop during their first semester. This didn’t surprise researchers, who chose to study the high school transition because it’s notoriously tough.
Researchers monitored kids’ stress levels daily, using surveys and measuring cortisol in saliva. Kids with a “growth mindset” — who believed their intelligence could be improved with effort — had significantly lower stress levels both the day after a bad grade and over time, compared to students who viewed their intelligence as “fixed.” Those with a “fixed” belief inhabited a prison of pessimism, maintaining high stress after failure. They were also much likelier to say they felt dumb, even when researchers controlled for current grades and prior test scores.
Beliefs are powerful. Over time, they’re also predictive.
“Declining grades may get ‘under the skin,’ as it were, for first-year high school students who believe intelligence is a fixed trait,” the study’s lead author, Hae Yeon Lee, says in a press release. “But believing, instead, that intelligence can be developed — or having what is called a growth mindset — may buffer the effects of academic stress.”
Isn’t this what we want for all students — to cope well with stress, to learn from failure and grow? Failure is inevitable; recalibrating after a setback is essential to success in school and life. Of course, students sometimes need additional resources to get back on track. Sometimes parents need to rein in runaway expectations. But undergirding any comeback is this: Kids must believe that effort matters and will help them succeed.
Really, this is a new spin on an old conversation. Ten years ago, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel challenged national “resignation” about math education, saying it seemed “rooted in the erroneous idea that success is largely a matter of inherent talent or ability, not effort.” Instead, success requires a certain state of mind. “… Changing children’s beliefs from a focus on ability to a focus on effort increases their engagement in mathematics learning, which in turn improves mathematics outcomes,” said the Math Panel. Sound familiar?
Believing that effort matters also fuels perseverance and self-discipline — enabling students to be dogged, to keep at it, to work now, play later. Earlier research from psychologist Martin Seligman and Angela Duckworth found self-discipline was more predictive of academic achievement than IQ. In their study of eighth-graders, published in Psychological Science, they wrote, “… Programs that build self-discipline may be the royal road to building academic achievement.” Duckworth, one of Seligman’s graduate students, later wrote the 2016 bestseller Grit, extolling the power of passion, perseverance, and effort in achievement.
So, kids, listen up: You can grow your abilities. Believe it. Work hard. Persevere. Beat the high school stress test, and trade that treadmill for your own royal road of achievement.
Kristen Blair is a Chapel Hill-based education writer.