15/01/2026 – Elisabeth CANNING

Résumé

Extensive research has illustrated how mindset beliefs (i.e., people’s beliefs about the fixedness or malleability of intelligence) operate as a “belief system” that influences the types of goals students set, how they attribute, interpret, and respond to struggles, and whether they seek or avoid challenging tasks and learning opportunities. Most of this research focuses exclusively on students and their belief systems, without considering the institutional, cultural, and contextual environment that either corroborates or negates these belief systems. In this talk, I will discuss my recent research on cultivating growth mindset cultures in the classroom. Instructors who endorse a growth mindset about ability tend to have smaller equity gaps in their courses. However, there is little experimental evidence for specific strategies that instructors can implement. Across several mixed-methods studies we find that growth mindset messages from instructors facilitate engagement and promote performance for people historically excluded due to their ethnicity/race, women in STEM fields, and first-generation college students.

Elizabeth A. Canning

Elizabeth A. Canning is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Washington State University. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is currently a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, Germany. She specializes in the study of achievement motivation, social inequality, and social-psychological interventions in education and organizations.