Using design thinking to improve psychological interventions: The case of the growth mindset during the transition to high school.

TLDR

Many promising psychological interventions exist, yet no clear methodology exists for scaling them up. This study formalizes a design‑thinking methodology for redesigning and tailoring initial psychological interventions. The authors applied this methodology to the growth‑mindset transition to high school, conducting qualitative inquiry and rapid, iterative randomized A/B experiments with ~3,000 participants to refine the intervention. The revised growth‑mindset intervention outperformed prior versions, improving short‑term proxy outcomes and boosting 9th‑grade core‑course GPA while reducing D/F GPAs for lower‑achieving students in a routine online delivery to ~95% of students at 10 schools, demonstrating a scalable model for enhancing educational interventions and teaching growth mindset more effectively.

Abstract

There are many promising psychological interventions on the horizon, but there is no clear methodology for preparing them to be scaled up. Drawing on design thinking, the present research formalizes a methodology for redesigning and tailoring initial interventions. We test the methodology using the case of fixed versus growth mindsets during the transition to high school. Qualitative inquiry and rapid, iterative, randomized "A/B" experiments were conducted with ~3,000 participants to inform intervention revisions for this population. Next, two experimental evaluations showed that the revised growth mindset intervention was an improvement over previous versions in terms of short-term proxy outcomes (Study 1, N=7,501), and it improved 9th grade core-course GPA and reduced D/F GPAs for lower achieving students when delivered via the Internet under routine conditions with ~95% of students at 10 schools (Study 2, N=3,676). Although the intervention could still be improved even further, the current research provides a model for how to improve and scale interventions that begin to address pressing educational problems. It also provides insight into how to teach a growth mindset more effectively.