Explore Your Brain 2.0: a maximally effective, usable and scalable growth mindset intervention to break through adolescents’ declining rates of motivation and school achievements

Introduction

Adolescence is a period of sharp declines in school motivation and achievement, with negative consequences not only for the academic success and mental wellbeing of youth, but also for teachers and parents. An interesting target for intervention is adolescents' implicit belief that their abilities are malleable (growth mindset), which has been shown to protect against declines in motivation and achievement, and to boost resilience in school and beyond.

Background

This PoC builds on the innovative growth mindset intervention Explore Your Brain (EYB), developed in the ERC StG BRAINBELIEFS. EYB uniquely combines theoretical information about brain plasticity with an experience of influence over one’s own brain, generated using neurofeedback. The results were very promising, but the technology is still in applied research status and not yet easily usable by teachers in the classroom.

Objectives

The main goal of this PoC is to drastically increase the impact that we can achieve on academic motivation, achievement, and resilience of high school students by improving our prototype growth mindset intervention. The breakthrough of the innovation depends on:

1. Increasing usability (Objective 1)
2. Increasing scalability (Objective 2)

These objectives aim to maximize the number of adolescents who can profit from the innovation.

Approach

To reach Objective 1, a Research & Development team including game designers and education specialists will iteratively develop and test Explore Your Brain 2.0 (EYB 2.0) adopting a users-as-designers approach.

To reach Objective 2, a Business Development team will develop a business plan for financially and logistically feasible large-scale implementation of EYB 2.0.

Conclusion

After completing this project, we hope to implement EYB 2.0 nationally as well as internationally at a large scale, thereby protecting a maximum number of adolescents against declines in school motivation and achievements. This benefits society at large because of higher educational attainment and mental wellbeing of the next generation.