> Dr. Carol Dweck... has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth.
I'm sympathetic to Khan's overall POV here, but "research says there are basically two kinds of people..." always tickles my skepticism antennae.
Claims like this are so often overstated by researchers to punch up an abstract, and then so often simplified further in uncritical 3rd party reports that I wouldn't bet a sandwich on the truth of any such claim without seeing the data for myself. C.f. the widely believed and largely unsupported claims about learning styles.
Would be nice of Khan to link to the publications so we could decide for ourselves.
Here's a paper by Dr. Dweck on the topic [1]. Thanks to dfabulich above for suggesting the right terms to google. I'm no expert at evaluating claims in developmental psychology, but this seems like credible research after a quick read through.
Note that the claims supported by the research here are closer to something like "praise of a certain kind makes children more likely to answer followup questions a certain way," rather than "there are two well separated groups of people that adhere to meaningfully differing mindsets in a persistent way."
Claims of the first kind are much less problematic, but as far as the latter, remember that there are many, many instances where the spread within a group of people is much larger than the difference between groups of people: that should be the default assumption whenever there isn't strong evidence to the contrary.
I'm sympathetic to Khan's overall POV here, but "research says there are basically two kinds of people..." always tickles my skepticism antennae.
Claims like this are so often overstated by researchers to punch up an abstract, and then so often simplified further in uncritical 3rd party reports that I wouldn't bet a sandwich on the truth of any such claim without seeing the data for myself. C.f. the widely believed and largely unsupported claims about learning styles.
Would be nice of Khan to link to the publications so we could decide for ourselves.