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This innovative practice full paper examines mindset understandings of three cohorts of first-year student scholars in a College of Computing at a private technical Carnegie-classified Doctoral University in the northeastern United States. Grounded in theories of intelligence, a growth mindset posits that intelligence and skills can be developed through continued practice and learning, while a fixed mindset situates one with the skills they have at birth, never to evolve or grow. Thirty-two undergraduate students across three years (10 students in year one, cohort one; 10 students in year two, cohort two; and 12 students in year three, cohort three) participated in a holistic growth mindset program that included three pillars: (a) faculty-student mentoring infused with growth mindset, (b) growth-mindset augmentations to the introductory programming course and (c) a growth mindset-scholar seminar - a series of meetings where each cohort met as a group to discuss and practice activating a growth mindset. Previous work with students has focused on more limited growth mindset interventions rather than a holistic approach. Prior to the scholars arriving on campus, the faculty involved in each of the pillars were part of a Community of Practice to learn about and activate their own growth mindset. At the end of their first semester in the project, each of the student cohorts participated in a focus group to learn about their understanding and application of growth and fixed mindset. We report findings from the student scholar data after one semester of participating in the three programmatic pillars in the context of growth mindset: mentoring, programming instruction, and the scholar seminar. Summary findings from the student perspectives are described including the use of illustrative quotes, in the students' own words, serving as a powerful reminder of the importance of growth mindset and relationship building. This has implications for addressing mindset in the future by considering how the innovative practice of embedding a growth mindset holistically into mentoring, instruction and a student seminar can provide support for students that standalone interventions cannot.
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Python Foundations: Data Science for All
The Python Foundations seminar emphasizes a hands-on approach and is designed to reach a diverse student population to provide them with the entry-level programming skills required in data science. The creation of the seminar materials has been funded by a three-year federal grant and has followed a systematic approach to enhance the student learning experience and raise student awareness of data science. The seminar materials—structured in three parts: pre-seminar, live seminar, and post-seminar—are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license to encourage adoption by any institution. To foster interest in the seminar, students have the possibility to earn a digital badge attesting to their newly acquired skills.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1829622
- PAR ID:
- 10158195
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference on Information Systems
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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