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The goal of this project is to better understand the beliefs that undergraduate students hold about their own intelligence and how these beliefs change during their undergraduate engineering education. The research team has used the theoretical framework established by Carol Dweck on Mindset and how different fixed and growth mindsets affect success. Fixed mindset individuals believe that their intelligence is an unchanging trait, while people with a growth mindset believe that through effort they can grow and develop greater intelligence. Prior researchers have shown that individuals with a growth mindset respond to challenges with higher levels of persistence, are more interested in improving upon past failures, and value criticism and effort more than those with a fixed mindset. The team developed an interview protocol from the theoretical framework. Then the team piloted the protocol and subsequently modified the protocol multiple times to ensure that the interviews provided rich qualitative data. Analytic memos were used to analyze and modify the piloted interview protocols. Once the final protocol was established, first-year and senior students were recruited to provide cross-sectional insight. The team also recruited using purposeful sampling to ensure that women and underrepresented minorities were included. To date, 19 interviews have been conducted with the final protocol. Of these interviews, four have been coded in detail using the “Attitudes, Values, and Beliefs” coding system. A codebook has also been started to categorize and interconnect the themes in the interview transcripts. This paper provides details of the protocol and coding process as well as preliminary findings on the themes extracted from the student interviews.
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Peer-Modeled Mindsets: An Approach to Customizing Life Sciences Studying Interventions
Mindset interventions, which shift students’ beliefs about classroom experiences, have shown promise for promoting diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Psychologists have emphasized the importance of customizing these interventions to specific courses, but there is not yet a protocol for doing so. We developed a protocol for creating customized “peer-modeled” mindset interventions that elicit advice from former students in videotaped interviews. In intervention activities, clips from these interviews, in which the former students’ stories model the changes in thinking about challenge and struggle that helped them succeed in a specific course, are provided to incoming life sciences students. Using this protocol, we developed a customized intervention for three sections of Introductory Biology I at a large university and tested it in a randomized controlled trial ( N = 917). The intervention shifted students’ attributions for struggle in the class away from a lack of potential to succeed and toward the need to develop a better approach to studying. The intervention also improved students’ approaches to studying and sense of belonging and had promising effects on performance and persistence in biology. Effects were pronounced among first-generation college students and underrepresented racial/ethnic minority students, who have been historically underrepresented in the STEM fields.
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- PAR ID:
- 10377981
- Editor(s):
- Dolan, Erin L.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CBE—Life Sciences Education
- Volume:
- 21
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1931-7913
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.22-07-0143
