Mindset, Learning Styles and Willingham
Can You Change How Smart You Are?
Some people believe that intelligence is fixed — you are born with a certain amount and that is it. Others believe that with effort and the right strategies, you can always improve. These are not just personal opinions: psychologist Carol Dweck argued that which belief you hold has a profound effect on how you learn, how you respond to failure, and how successful you become. Her theory divides learners into two broad types based on their beliefs about ability.
Dweck’s Mindset Theory
Carol Dweck proposed that learners operate from one of two fundamental beliefs about their intelligence and abilities. These are known as the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.
A person with a fixed mindset believes that you are either good at something or you are not, and that hard work cannot really change this. Failure is threatening because it feels like evidence of permanent inability. These learners tend to avoid challenges where they might look stupid and are more likely to give up when work gets difficult.
A person with a growth mindset believes that ability and intelligence can be developed through effort, practice and good strategies. Failure is informative — it tells you where to try harder or where to change your approach. These learners tend to embrace challenges, persist in the face of difficulties, and improve more over time.
Fixed mindset: believes ability is unchangeable; avoids challenges; gives up at failure. Growth mindset: believes ability can be developed; embraces challenges; uses failure as information. Dweck’s research found that mindset significantly predicts academic achievement.
The Role of Praise
Dweck’s research found that the type of praise a child receives can shape which mindset they develop. Praising children for being clever or talented (“You’re so smart!”) promotes a fixed mindset: it signals that intelligence is a fixed trait worth protecting, so children avoid challenges where they might not look smart. Praising children for their effort and strategies (“You worked really hard on that”) promotes a growth mindset: it signals that the path to success is through effort, not inherited ability.
This finding has important implications for teachers and parents. Well-intentioned compliments about ability can, paradoxically, reduce a child’s willingness to take on difficult tasks. Effort-based praise is more likely to build resilience and a love of learning.
Self-Efficacy and Learning
Self-efficacy refers to a person’s belief in their own capacity to succeed. It is closely related to mindset: a growth mindset tends to support higher self-efficacy because the learner believes that improvement is possible. A fixed mindset tends to undermine self-efficacy because a student who believes their ability is fixed is more likely to interpret failure as a ceiling on what they can ever achieve.
High self-efficacy is associated with setting more ambitious goals, persisting longer on difficult tasks, and recovering more quickly from setbacks. In educational settings, teachers who help students build accurate beliefs about their ability to improve — through feedback focused on progress — are supporting self-efficacy alongside academic development.
The idea of learning styles became popular in education from the 1970s onwards. The claim is that students learn best when information is delivered in a format matching their preferred style. The simplest version of this idea distinguishes between verbalisers, who prefer to learn through reading and verbal explanation, and visualisers, who prefer images, diagrams and spatial representations.
In practical terms, a verbaliser might prefer detailed written notes and explanations, while a visualiser might prefer concept maps, timelines and visual summaries. Teachers who try to ‘match’ their style to each student’s preference are applying learning styles theory — though, as we will see, this application has been strongly criticised.
Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham is one of the most prominent critics of learning styles theory. His central argument is that while people may have preferences for how they receive information, preference does not equal effectiveness — and the evidence does not show that teaching in a student’s preferred style produces better learning outcomes.
Willingham argues that whether a visual or verbal presentation works better depends on the nature of the content, not on the student’s preference. Some information is inherently spatial and is best presented visually (maps, diagrams of anatomical structures). Other information is inherently verbal and is best presented in words (arguments, narratives, definitions). The content should drive the format, not the supposed preference of the learner.
Willingham also points out that the ‘meshing hypothesis’ — the idea that matching teaching style to learning style improves outcomes — has not been consistently supported by experimental research. Studies that have tried to test it have typically not found that learners do better when taught in their preferred style.
Willingham argued that learning styles theory is not supported by evidence: preference does not equal effectiveness, the content should determine the format, and experimental research has not consistently shown that matching teaching to preferred style improves outcomes.
Evaluating Mindset Theory and Learning Styles
Dweck’s mindset theory has been broadly supported by research and has been widely applied in schools through ‘growth mindset’ interventions. However, some researchers have questioned whether the effects found in controlled studies translate reliably into real-world classrooms. Replication studies have sometimes found smaller effects than Dweck’s original research.
Learning styles as a concept has intuitive appeal, and people do have real preferences for how they like to receive information. The problem, as Willingham points out, is not that preferences exist but that matching instruction to preference has not been shown to improve learning. The implication for education is to design lessons based on what the content requires and what cognitive science shows works — rather than on unvalidated style categories.