Despite rapid advances in primary school enrolment across many African countries in the 1990s, the quality of education remains a challenge, with pervasively high rates of repetition and dropout. For instance, in Malawi, where this project takes place, a nationally representative survey of 559 primary schools found the average repetition rate to be approximately 20 percent across all standards in primary schools. While a host of systemic challenges have been well documented, there is an emergent empirical literature on the role of meta-beliefs in predicting education outcomes at an individual level (Alan et al. 2019; Duckworth et al. 2007; Yeager et al. 2019; Kautz et al. 2014). In Malawi, student attitudes and beliefs about their abilities have been found to be more predictive of learning outcomes than household wealth or home language (World Bank, 2020).
What are meta-beliefs?
Meta-beliefs or mental models are belief systems that structure how information is processed, which in turn affects how subsequent beliefs are formed. Meta-beliefs are upheld by narratives, which in turn shape identities, such as the type of “learner” a child might embody. To date, one particular meta-belief has received a lot of attention in the recent educational psychology literature: growth mindset. Growth mindset is a generalised belief that intelligence or ability are not fixed traits, but rather ones that grow with effort (Dweck 2006). This generalised belief can shape a person’s response to specific situations, such as an individuals’ interpretation of setbacks during any learning process. For instance, if a student interprets an academic failure to mean that they are incapable at performing well at a subject, they have an incentive to avoid the school activity and remain incompetent. Interventions to promote growth mindset have improved student learning outcomes (Bettinger et al. 2018; Paunesku et al. 2015; Yeager et al. 2019).
Changing mindsets and beliefs through policy can be challenging, especially in low-resource contexts. Hence, many psychological interventions seek to shift behaviours instead as an indirect means to changing mindsets. For instance, students are often taught to approach academic challenges and failure by adopting more behavioural techniques, such as taking deep breaths. Little is known about the relative impact of promoting a growth mindset intervention relative to a behavioural intervention on the decision to persevere, especially in the face of challenges.
This study seeks to examine what are the impacts of tackling meta-beliefs about educational performance through a behavioural intervention on perseverance in rural Malawi.
