Learning Theories: Dweck and Willingham

How learning can influence development

Learning theories explain how experience can change a person's knowledge, skills and approach to challenges. In education, this raises two connected questions: how do learners' beliefs affect their response to difficulty, and how can teaching help them understand and remember information?

Carol Dweck focuses on beliefs about whether ability can change. Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist, focuses on how people learn and on whether common teaching approaches are supported by evidence.

Dweck: fixed and growth mindsets

A fixed mindset is the belief that intelligence or ability is largely unchangeable. A learner with this belief may interpret difficulty as evidence that they lack ability: ‘I cannot do this because I am not clever enough.’ Challenges can therefore feel like tests of their worth rather than opportunities to learn. The learner may avoid difficult tasks or give up to protect their image of being capable.

A growth mindset is the belief that ability can develop through learning, effort and practice. Difficulty can instead be interpreted as a sign that more learning is needed: ‘I cannot do this yet.’ This encourages persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

The distinction concerns beliefs about ability, not two separate levels of intelligence. Believing that improvement is possible does not mean that learning will be easy or that everyone will achieve identical results. Mindsets can also change, and a person may believe they can improve at tennis while regarding their mathematical ability as fixed.

Why the focus of praise matters

Dweck's ideas suggest that feedback can influence these beliefs. Praising a learner as ‘naturally clever’ directs attention towards a supposedly fixed personal quality. Later failure may then seem to contradict that label: if success means ‘I am clever’, struggling may mean ‘I am not clever’.

Praise for effort directs attention towards something the learner can change. Recognising that a pupil kept working through a difficult task links progress with their approach to learning rather than with a permanent label. Process praise can also recognise effective strategies: ‘You tried turning the puzzle piece and matched its edges.’ This tells the child which learning behaviour was useful, rather than simply judging the child.

Mueller and Dweck's research in 1998 supports this distinction. Children completed problems and received praise for intelligence or effort. When offered a choice afterwards, most children praised for intelligence preferred an easier task that protected their successful image, whereas most praised for effort chose a challenging task from which they could learn. When later problems became difficult, intelligence-praised children lost confidence and their performance declined; effort-praised children remained more engaged and their performance improved. These findings support the idea that the focus of praise can affect motivation and responses to setbacks.

However, effort is not a guarantee of understanding. A pupil may work hard using an ineffective method or without enough guidance. A balanced judgement is that encouraging persistence can support learning, but should accompany useful teaching and feedback rather than replace them.

Willingham: preferences are not learning styles

Learning styles theory claims that students learn best when teaching matches their preferred sensory format: visual information, auditory information or kinaesthetic, hands-on activity.

Willingham challenges the matching claim, not the existence of preferences. Enjoying diagrams does not establish that a person will learn every topic better through diagrams. Pashler and colleagues' 2008 review found no adequate evidence supporting the claim that matching teaching to learning styles improves performance.

Instead, the content and task should guide the method. Learning to play the piano requires physical practice; reading about playing cannot substitute for it, even for someone who prefers reading. The useful question is therefore what representation or activity helps someone learn this particular material, rather than which permanent category describes the learner.

Meaning helps information become memorable

Willingham emphasises understanding what information means and connecting it to existing knowledge. Remembering the date of a historical event is different from understanding why it happened. Explaining its causes gives the date a place within a connected account rather than leaving it as an isolated fact. These connections help new information become established in long-term memory.

Teaching should therefore encourage reasoning about the intended content. An entertaining activity is not necessarily effective if pupils spend their attention on its distracting features rather than the concept being taught.

Meaning does not remove the need for practice. Repeated practice can produce automaticity: a skill becomes less demanding of conscious attention. Working memory holds and processes information during a task, but its capacity is limited. Knowing multiplication facts automatically, for example, leaves more working-memory capacity available for solving a multi-step problem. Understanding and practice can therefore work together.

Evaluating the learning theories

A strength of these approaches is their practical relevance. Dweck directs attention towards feedback and responses to difficulty; Willingham encourages teachers to choose methods appropriate to the content and to develop understanding rather than rely on learning-style labels. Dweck's praise research provides evidence for her proposed link between feedback and learning behaviour.

However, research on growth-mindset interventions has produced mixed findings. An Education Endowment Foundation evaluation in 2015 found no significant improvement in maths and English results compared with a control group. This limits the claim that teaching a growth mindset necessarily improves academic attainment: changes in motivation may not always produce better examination results.

Another criticism concerns cultural generalisability. An emphasis on individual effort and achievement may be less applicable in collectivist cultures, where group success is more strongly valued. This does not show that growth mindsets cannot exist in those cultures, but it questions whether the same messages and applications will work equally well everywhere.

There are also qualifications to Willingham's approach. Repetition remains useful for basic skills, so meaningful learning should not be interpreted as a rejection of all rote practice. His caution about expecting beginners to think like expert scientists has been challenged: conducting experiments can help pupils understand scientific problems, such as controlling extraneous variables, even if they cannot yet reason like experts.

Nature and nurture work together

Both approaches emphasise nurture because teaching, feedback and learning experiences can influence development. Dweck explains how beliefs and praise affect persistence; Willingham explains how teaching methods can support understanding and memory.

However, nature also matters. Biological influences, including brain development and differences in working-memory capacity, affect how readily learners cope with tasks. Overemphasising effort risks making a pupil blame themselves when they work hard but still struggle. Rejecting fixed learning-style categories does not mean ignoring genuine differences in learners' needs.

A justified conclusion is that beliefs and teaching methods can support development, but neither operates in isolation. Learning reflects an interaction between the learner's characteristics and the opportunities, support and instruction they receive.

Dweck

• Fixed mindset: ability is largely unchangeable; difficulty may signal lack of ability.
• Growth mindset: ability can develop; difficulty offers an opportunity to learn.
• Effort/process praise: encourages persistence and strategy use rather than protecting a fixed ‘clever’ label.
• Support: Mueller and Dweck (1998) found greater challenge-seeking and persistence after effort praise than intelligence praise.
• Limits: mixed intervention findings; cultural generalisability; effort needs effective methods and support.

Willingham

• Preferences exist, but matching teaching to a preferred learning style lacks adequate supporting evidence.
• Choose methods to suit the content and task.
• Meaning: understanding and connections with prior knowledge support remembering.
• Practice: automaticity frees working-memory capacity for demanding tasks.
• Qualifications: repetition helps basic skills; investigations can develop understanding without requiring expert-level thinking.

Nature–nurture evaluation

• Nurture: teaching, praise and experience influence learning.
• Nature: biological development and cognitive capacities also matter.
• Conclusion: useful teaching applications, but neither mindset nor teaching method alone guarantees achievement.