Results Part 2: How Growth Planning Achieves Mindset Change & Development

NOTE:

These results are from the initial 2005-2006 beta test of our growth planning process. We are now in the process of gathering longitudinal results from two groups:

High school age youth participating in our future-use college scholarship and immediate-use cash payment Incentives Program.
8th grade and high school age youth now using (1) the totally revised "back office" of our website where they build and benchmark their Growth Plan, and (2) our totally revised mindset & lifestyle change and development curriculum.

As soon as these more current results are available, they will be posted here.

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During 2005 and early 2006, 29 high school and 51 college students in 8 different growth planning groups helped us test whether our growth planning process was helping develop what we call a lifelong growth planning mindset. After taking about 15 hours over several months to build their Growth Plan, students completed an initial and a final evaluation using a 7-point scale to rate their view of the increasing presence of four key indicators for developing a growth planning mindset -- future orientation, future hopefulness, future possibilities, and future certainty. Here is a summary of these mindset development field-test results.

>> 45% INCREASE IN FUTURE ORIENTATION. Using a 7-point scale, we asked youth to look back on their lives so far and rate how they tended to deal with (or orient themselves to) "the future" in their everyday life. We also asked them to look forward and rate how they would like to orient their lives for the next 5-10 years. A rating of 1 represented a reactive life-orientation of responding to whatever comes up - going with the flow; and a 7 represented a proactive life-orientation of making things happen for me - following a plan.

After building their Growth Plan, high school groups showed an average 68% increase in their desired future-orientation, while college groups showed a 22% average increase ... for an overall increase of 45%. And, among high school youth, 11th-12th graders wanted significantly more future orientation than did 9-10th graders.

>> 15% INCREASE IN FUTURE HOPEFULNESS. Using the same 7-point scale, students were asked whether they felt "quite depressed" or "quite hopeful" about their future.

After building their Growth Plan, high school groups showed a 6% average increase in hopefulness, while college groups showed an 23% increase. For both groups, there was an average of 15% increased hopefulness. And, among high school youth, 11th-12th graders showed significantly more hopefulness than did 9-10th graders.

>> 8% INCREASE IN FUTURE POSSIBILITIES. Again, using the 7-point scale, growth planners rated whether they saw their lives as having very few or a lot of future possibilities.

After building their Growth Plan, high school groups showed 4% and college groups a 12% average increase in future possibilities for their lives, for an overall increase of 8%.

>> 5% INCREASE IN FUTURE CERTAINTY. Using a 3-point scale, growth planners rated how certain they were about what they would like their lives to be 1, 5, 10, and 15 years from now.

After developing their Growth Plan, high school groups showed a 9% average increase in certainty of what they wanted their lives to be like. College students showed a 4% average decrease in certainty, for an overall 5% increase in certainty of what growth planners would like their future lives to look like.

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As is the case with any mindset and lifestyle change research, we need to be very cautious in assuming a direct-line causality between the growth planning experience and mindset changes captured in a simple written survey. A lot is going on in the lives of high school and college students over a period of several months. At best, we can only tentatively assume that our growth planning experience may be beginning to make a mindset and lifestyle difference in the lives of young people.

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To request a bound copy of the entire 65-page Field-Test Results Report (cover shown above), send us a message using the Contact Us feature on the top menu bar of this website.