“Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.”

-Mahatma Gandhi

In the previous chapter we touched on your individual characteristics that frame and shape your educational experience. One area we glossed over, however, was your mindset. Your attitude towards education plays a significant role on how you approach college. It shapes your image, your overall experience, and your actions. Yogi Berra framed it in terms of baseball, saying “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.” However, education is not that much different. While your actions and results may be at the forefront, examining your beliefs and attitudes towards education matters significantly. In the following sections, we will introduce the role of mindset, how your own perception of education influences your approach to your academics and introduce some psychological practices that can influence your behaviors.

2.1 Learner vs. Student

One of the most significant changes that many students experience when they transition from high school to college is a shift in the expectation of you as a “student” to that of a “learner” and the resulting adjustment in mindset about the process of acquiring knowledge. A “student,” in the most basic sense, acquires information from the teacher, completes assignments under the oversight of an instructor and success is determined by grades. A “learner”, on the other hand, acquires information both inside and outside of the classroom. Learning is often self directed but also happens through collaboration with the instructor and peers. Success is identified not just by grades but by the process of learning, mastery of the subject and the ability to make connections across subjects and ideas.¹

In short, as a “learner” you take greater ownership of your educational experience.  Information is provided by an instructor in lectures or discussions, but you are also responsible for generating new information, asking questions and thinking critically and engaging your previous knowledge. By examining the differences between what it means to be a “student” versus a “learner”, you can see how the definition of “success” changes when your mindset about the learning process shifts. Focusing less on just the outcome, i.e.-grades, and more on the process of learning and mastery of material, can lead to deeper understanding and greater success in the long term.

Liberal Arts Education

If your goal in attending college is to “just get a job”, then why bother engaging in a diverse liberal arts education versus focusing on vocational or pre-professional training? Many higher education institutions, including Boise State, require students to take several classes across a variety of disciplines, with the vast majority of these courses being outside your declared major.  You may initially view these “requirements” as being worthless or irrelevant.  You may make statements like, “this class doesn’t matter…when am I EVER going to use this information.”

Boise State describes its liberal arts offering as “foundational requirements” and are part of the curriculum to “ensure that students are repeatedly exposed to the essential soft skills sought in college graduates as well as the disciplinary outcomes important for breadth of learning. These outcomes were developed by the faculty to provide undergraduates with a common experience aimed at unifying the university’s diverse student body and expanding students’ awareness of themselves and their world.”²

The goal of helping students develop a mastery of content to increase understanding of the diverse ways of thinking and knowing the world are essential for long term success after college.

If you think about higher education as solely job employment, consider this:  employers overwhelmingly endorse broad learning and cross-cutting skills as the best preparation for long-term career success. The college learning outcomes they rate as most important are oral communication, critical thinking, ethical judgment, working effectively in teams, written communication, and the real-world application of skills and knowledge.³

Developing an appreciation for the long term value of diverse learning opportunities is at the heart of a liberal arts education.  We urge you to consider the value you place on courses outside of your major area of study–think about your motivation and level of engagement in that material.  With a deeper understanding of the inherent value in learning across disciplines and the value that employers place on the skills cultivated through a liberal arts curriculum, perhaps you will find your mindset shifting in a way that will increase motivation and shift your understanding of success.

2.2 Growth vs Fixed Mindset

The idea of mindset is not a novel concept. Nevertheless, it can have a significant impact on your experience as a college student. In simple terms, mindset is the attitudes you hold regarding any aspect of your life. Think about your perceptions regarding your preferred class, your ideal work environment, your relationships. All of those combined create your overall mindset.

Carol Dweck⁴, a pioneer psychologist that focuses on motivation, identified two types of mindset when it comes to evaluating our own abilities, growth and fixed mindset. These self-conceptions guide behavior, actions, and impact motivation. A person with a fixed mindset has a very static perception of their abilities. They believe that their intelligence, character, or skills cannot be easily improved or that significant changes cannot be made. One common example of a fixed mindset relates to math. Have you thought or heard “I’m not good at math”, “I’m not a math person”, or “I hate math and math hates me back”? A fixed mindset positions the student to believe that challenges cannot be overcome or that their skills cannot get better in a significant way. A person with a growth mindset, on the other hand, sees progression in a much different light. With effort, abilities improve. They embrace criticism, feedback, and challenges. They see them as an opportunity for development.

Since mindset is the combination of attitudes, you might observe different types of mindset around various aspects of your life. Maybe you have a growth mindset around sports, seeing your improvement in the basketball court each time you practice. But you might have a fixed mindset in regards to your dancing skills and believe that no matter how much you try, your moves on the dance floor will not improve. Consider your education for a moment. Think about your experience in college so far. What is your mindset regarding school? Do you notice having a fixed mindset in some areas and a growth mindset in others?

Mindset and Fear of Failure

In the movie Apollo 13, Ed Harris portrays NASA flight director Gene Kranz as he successfully guides the crew of a damaged spacecraft to safety. In a famous scene during which Kranz and his staff are attempting to overcome some extremely daunting challenges, Harris shouts, “Failure, though never the intended outcome, can and sometimes does happen.” Consider how you respond to failure–do you shy away from opportunities that pose the risk of failure? Do you consider failure to define who you are or your abilities?

Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—a fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character—well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.⁴

One might think that having confidence in your intelligence is a whole lot better than thinking that you’re stupid, but the result was the same. A fixed mindset can hold you back because it can lead to a paralyzing fear of failure. Have you ever had a teacher, parent or peer tell you how smart you are? Did you believe them? If so, great, but that confidence in your intelligence can be a double-edged sword. High school and college offer many occasions when self-confidence in innate intelligence can be threatened. Perhaps you believe that if you fail on a test or in a course it means that you are not the smart person you believed yourself to be. If you fail, family and friends will find out that they were wrong.

However, there is a way to avoid all of the risks of academic rigor. You could just not try. You might think, “If I don’t try I’ll get bad marks on my report card, but those won’t be true indicators of my intelligence.”  By not putting forth any effort, your intelligence would never be disproven. With this kind of self talk, it is fear, not logic, which is guiding your behavior. This is a form of avoidance behavior that is common in education. Students avoid participating on specific tasks that might disprove their own image of themselves or might shine a light on areas of improvements the student is not ready to tackle.

In contrast, Dweck writes that, “growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts”⁴. Dweck goes on to explain that we can choose to have a growth mindset about any type of ability, whether it’s math, art, athletics, or any other skill that one wishes to cultivate.

Nevertheless, when it comes to academic success and success in all phases of life, failure is always an option. Though it can be painful, failure can lead to great learning and progress when analyzed through the lens of a growth mindset. By focusing more on effort than on outcomes anyone can learn and grow, regardless of their skill level. Therefore, to make the most of their time in college, seek out challenges that will stretch your abilities. These challenges can take many forms and occur in a variety of settings, both inside and outside of the classroom. When seeking out challenges there is always the possibility of agonizing defeat, but out of that defeat can be the seeds of great success in the future.⁵

Locus of Control

Locus of control is a psychological concept that refers to how strongly people believe they have control over the situations and experiences that affect their lives. In education, locus of control typically refers to how students perceive the causes of their academic success or failure.

Students with an “internal locus of control” generally believe that their success or failure is a result of the effort and hard work they invest in their education. Students with an “external locus of control” generally believe that successes or failures result from external factors beyond their control, such as luck, fate, circumstance, injustice, bias, or teachers who are unfair, prejudiced, or unskilled. For example, students with an internal locus of control might blame poor grades on their failure to study, whereas students with an external locus of control may blame an unfair teacher or test for their poor performance.

Whether internal or external,  locus of control is believed to have a powerful effect on academic motivation, persistence, and achievement in school. In education, “internals” are considered more likely to work hard in order to learn, progress, and succeed, while “externals” are more likely to believe that working hard is “pointless” because someone or something else is treating them unfairly or holding them back. Students with an external locus of control may also believe that their accomplishments will not be acknowledged or their effort will not result in success.

For some students, an external locus of control can become a coping mechanism to comprehend or justify their past experiences. Negative exposures, exceptionally difficult challenges, or encountering failure regularly can lead to the aforementioned behavior. Blaming other people or external factors is a process to rationalize their experience and subsequent behavior.

Several questionnaires have been developed to help identify whether students tend toward an internal or external locus of control. Julian B. Rotter, the psychologist who originally developed the locus-of-control concept, created a widely used question-based assessment and a corresponding scale designed to identify where students are on the internal-external spectrum. The questionnaire offers a series of choices between two statements. For example, the respondent would choose between “I have often found that what is going to happen will happen” or “Trusting to fate has never turned out as well for me as making a decision to take a definite course of action.” Rotter’s assessment is one of a number of diagnostic tools and scales that may be used by psychologists and educators.

Locus of control is directly linked to mindset. Take a moment and see the similarities between a fixed mindset and an external locus of control and growth mindset and an internal locus of control. These characteristics play a role on how students perceive education and their own progress in their educational careers. These are psychological factors that must be fostered, as in the case of growth mindset and internal locus of control, or overcome, as in the case of fixed mindset and external locus of control.

Thinking about your experience, are mindset and locus of control areas that you should consider improving?

2.3 Stereotype Threat & Imposter Syndrome

There are multiple psychological phenomena that may be impacting your mindset toward school without your awareness. Two that we’ll focus on are stereotype threat and imposter syndrome.

Stereotype threat⁶ refers to the risk of confirming negative stereotypes about an individual’s racial, ethnic, gender, or cultural group. The term was coined by the researchers Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson⁷, who demonstrated that black college students performed worse on standardized tests than their white peers when they were reminded before taking the tests that their racial group stereotypically does poorly on such exams. When their race was not emphasized, however, black students performed similarly to their white peers.

Many studies have looked at both race- and gender-based stereotypes, including one that found that women performed less well in a chess match when they were told they would be playing against a male. When they were reminded that women tend to be worse at chess than men, their performance also declined.

Steele and Aronson found that situational factors—more than individual personality or other characteristics—can strengthen or weaken the stereotype-threat effect. For example, student performance was influenced by the way a test was described. When students were told that the test measured their intelligence, black students performed significantly worse than their white peers, but when they were told that the test diagnosed their ability to solve problems, the race-based performance gap disappeared⁷. Other influential factors include the difficulty of the task and the relevance of the negative stereotype to the task. In addition, the stereotype-threat effect appeared to be stronger among students who wanted to perform well and who more strongly identified with the stereotyped group.

Imposter syndrome refers to a pattern of behavior where individuals doubt their accomplishments, attributing them to luck or chance, and have a persistent issue with accepting their successes as a result of their hard work⁸. It was first studied in the 1970s by researchers Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes who recognized the behaviors in high achievers who fail to acknowledge their abilities and instead fear they will be found out as a fraud^{9 10}.

Consider how you speak about yourself and your academic successes. After doing well on an assignment or exam, do you say you just got lucky or it was easier than you expected? When you do well in a course, do you attribute it to the chance that you got an instructor that was not too hard of a grader? Upon getting offered a job, do you think the only reason you got it was because there must have been little to no other applicants? Have you sat in a class and assumed everyone else knows exactly what is going on and only you are lost?

These are typical thoughts of people who struggle with imposter syndrome. Though not an actual diagnosable disorder, imposter syndrome impacts most people in some way regardless of their identities or past performance in a given area. You may even see it come up only in specific times, like in academic settings, but not in others, such as competing in athletic events.

Both stereotype threat and imposter syndrome can develop as a result of overt or subtle messaging from parents, peers and teachers. Teachers may have given subtle signals that they perceive girls to be less capable in math and science, while suggesting—implicitly or explicitly—that boys are expected to excel in math and science. If the girls internalize these messages, they may shy away from challenging math problems or learning opportunities such as math-team competitions. If stereotype threat then causes them to perform below their real ability on tests, it may confirm their feelings and perceptions of inferiority.  It is also important to acknowledge the role that social norms play in the development of negative stereotypes and the impact of stereotype threat.  Many of us accept the social status quo and take for granted the assumptions we make about others.  We will encourage you to reflect on and check your ingrained beliefs about others (and yourself) because our judgements and expectations of others have a real impact. Those who experience stereotype threat in evaluative situations often leads to underperformance⁷.

Imposter syndrome can show up in students who were high achieving children, but face struggles academically as teens or young adults. It also commonly appears in students with tendencies toward perfectionism or who have difficulties asking for or accepting help. People are taught to deflect in situations where they are being complimented to appear humble, but doing so regularly can cause a person to internalize those messages and begin to believe they lack the abilities necessary to achieve¹¹.

Overcoming either stereotype threat or imposter syndrome takes time and effort. The first step is to recognize and acknowledge these thoughts of yourself or others when you have them, then begin challenging your own thinking. This is easier said than done. These thoughts and feelings of inferiority have most likely been deeply ingrained in you over many years. Challenging your internalized beliefs about abilities can over time lead you to viewing past failures as learning opportunities and successes as achievements that you worked hard for and deserved.

Finally, when evaluating your thought process it’s important to reflect on the people you surround yourself with and the messages you regularly receive from others. Examine the social media accounts you follow and the impact they are having on you mentally. Replace the negative accounts with ones that can provide encouragement and spark positive personal reflection. It may be necessary to adjust your social circle to spend less time with the people who reinforce these negative feelings and more time with trusted mentors and friends who provide encouragement. If you feel like you are in need of an unbiased, confidential source to help you work through this, we recommend meeting with a professional counselor at Health Services.

Concluding

Many of us have heard the adage, “speak to yourself the way you would speak to someone you love.”  This sentiment is particularly important when examining your mindset and patterns of thought that may be impacting your ability to reach your goals. Perhaps your first goal on this journey is to notice patterns of negativity in your thinking or discouraging self talk and find ways to “flip the script” and see opportunities in challenges. Establishing relationships with those who support the development of a positive mindset is equally important. Advisors, faculty, teaching assistants, coaches, friends, teammates and family can all support you in identifying your strengths and we urge you to write them down as daily reminders.

Citations

1. Sanders, Matthew L. Becoming a Learner: Realizing the Opportunity of Education. Macmillan Learning Curriculum Solutions, 2018.
2. University Foundations. Office of the Registrar. Boise State University. https://www.boisestate.edu/registrar/degree-requirements/foundational-studies-program/
3. Pasquerella, Lynn. Yes, Employers Do Value Liberal Arts Degrees. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/09/yes-employers-do-value-liberal-arts-degrees
4. Dweck, Carol. Mindset: the New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books, 2006.
5. MacIntosh, Andrew S., et al. “Youth Definitions of Success, Obstacles to Success, and How Significant Others Can Help: Providing Youth a Voice in Their Own Development.” International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, vol. 25, no. 1, 2019, pp. 491–504., doi:10.1080/02673843.2019.1674166.
6. Stereotype Threat. The Glossary of Education Reform. https://www.edglossary.org/stereotype-threat/
7. Steele, C. M., and Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 69.
8. Dalla-Camina, Megan. The Reality of Imposter Syndrome. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/real-women/201809/the-reality-imposter-syndrome
9. Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247.
10. Weir, Kirsten. Feel Like a Fraud?. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2013/11/fraud
11. Abrams, Abigail. Yes, Impostor Syndrome Is Real. Here’s How to Deal with It. Time. https://time.com/5312483/how-to-deal-with-impostor-syndrome/