Changing Teacher Feedback to Foster Children’s Growth Mindset: A Teacher-Mediated School-Based Intervention in Chinese Early Elementary Classrooms.

Abstract

Growth mindset interventions may depend on whether everyday classroom feedback reinforces the belief that ability can develop. This quasi-experimental pretest–posttest control-group study evaluated a brief teacher-mediated intervention in Chinese early elementary classrooms. Twelve teachers with fixed-mindset tendencies and 175 students in Grades 1–3 participated. One school was allocated to the intervention condition and another continued treatment-as-usual instruction. Intervention teachers completed a 4-hour workshop on growth mindset and feedback rewriting, followed by 1 week of classroom enactment. Outcomes included teacher mindset, teacher-reported feedback, student-perceived teacher feedback, and children’s growth mindset; supplementary interviews involved six intervention teachers and 24 students. Relative to the control condition, intervention teachers showed stronger growth mindset and less personality feedback, students perceived more process-oriented and less personality feedback, and children improved on the general mindset measure and selected contextual dimensions. Teacher-reported process feedback and the contextual mindset total score did not show significant interactions. Interviews supported the interpretation that teachers used fewer trait labels and more strategy-focused guidance. Findings are preliminary because allocation was non-random, condition was confounded with school, only 12 teacher clusters participated, and follow-up was limited to 1 week.