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

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
adolescent’s 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. This PoC builds on the innovative growth mindset
intervention Explore Your Brain (EYB), developed in my 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.
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 increasing usability (Objective 1) and scalability (Objective 2), to maximize the number of adolescents who can profit
from the innovation. 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.
After completing this project, we can 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.