Lec­tur­ing stu­dents on the fact that gen­eral intel­li­gence can be improved and that cer­tain races and gen­ders are not nat­u­rally more intel­li­gent than oth­ers (in-line with cur­rent research) can improve test scores–especially for mem­bers of the groups typ­i­cally thought of as hav­ing lim­ited intelligence.

It’s not just the­o­ret­i­cal: the find­ings were applied suc­cess­fully to schools in New York City, show­ing that “real­iz­ing that one’s intel­li­gence may be improved may actu­ally improve one’s intel­li­gence”.

Despite a lot of evi­dence to the con­trary, many peo­ple believe that intel­li­gence is fixed, and, more­over, that some racial and social groups are inher­ently smarter than oth­ers. Merely evok­ing these stereo­types about the intel­lec­tual infe­ri­or­ity of these groups (such as women and Blacks) is enough to harm the aca­d­e­mic per­fo­mance of mem­bers of these groups. […]

Yet social psy­chol­o­gists [have] taught African Amer­i­can and Euro­pean Amer­i­can col­lege stu­dents to think of intel­li­gence as change­able, rather than fixed — a les­son that many psy­cho­log­i­cal stud­ies sug­gests is true. Stu­dents in a con­trol group did not receive this mes­sage. Those stu­dents who learned about IQ’s mal­leabil­ity improved their grades more than did stu­dents who did not receive this mes­sage, and also saw aca­d­e­mics as more impor­tant than did stu­dents in the con­trol group.