Week 7 Growth Mindset: Learning about Growth Mindset

I was browsing through the articles about growth mindset, and I found one that seemed to relate to me. The article was called "Learning about struggles of famous scientists may help students succeed in science." In this study, freshmen and sophomores of a low-income high school were divided into three groups. One group read about scientists' struggles while the other group only read about scientists' successes. After a six-week period, the students who read about scientific failures showed a grade increase while the other group showed a grade decrease. The part of the article that really stuck me was this sentence: Many students don't realize that all successes require a long journey with many failures along the way. I can't stress this enough to my friends that failure is part of the learning process. In fact, sometimes I forget that! Recently, I haven't been receiving the best grades for my capstone assignments, and it becomes frustrating knowing how much hard work I put into each paper. I have to remind myself constantly that I can't succeed at everything. It's not failure. It's a lesson to be learned.

Moreover, it's sometimes difficult to be a science major and to see failure when you're taught about every scientists' successes. In comparison, I felt stupid and inadequate. Sometimes it seemed useless to continue studying science because I believed I couldn't never reach their level of success. However, everything came into perspective in my history of science course when I learned about the hundreds of failed experiments or the years of research to finally reach the eureka moment. Science is hard work. Life is hard work. There would never be any progress if no one failed. In fact, the world be plain and boring if we didn't fall every once in awhile.

Failure doesn't define anyone. Source.