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Students’ view of intelligence (i.e., their mindset beliefs) has been found to be related to their self-efficacy and goal orientations as well as to influence their course outcomes. Comparisons of students’ chemistry mindset between different groups found that organic chemistry I students held more of a growth mindset than general chemistry I students at the beginning of a term. Additionally, men tended to hold more growth mindset beliefs than women. Given these differences, structural equation modeling was used to explore the relations between students’ mindset, self-efficacy, and goal orientations, along with their relation to achievement outcomes within a course. An indirect effect of mindset on summative achievement was found to be mediated through performance-avoidance goals, whereas the relation between self-efficacy and summative achievement was mediated through performance-approach, mastery-avoidance, and performance-avoidance goal orientations. While mindset was not found to be directly or indirectly related to formative achievement outcomes, self-efficacy was found to have an indirect effect on formative achievement through mastery-approach and mastery-avoidance goal orientations. Additionally, an interaction between mindset and self-efficacy was found to be related to performance-avoidance goals, as has been suggested in prior studies. These results point to the importance of mindset on achievement outcomes while also considering influences from self-efficacy and goal orientations. Future work is encouraged to investigate how these variables are related when they are measured throughout a term.
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A Flexible Formative/Summative Grading System for Large Courses
Students in entry level CS courses come from diverse backgrounds and are learning study and time management skills. Our belief for their success is that they must master a growth mindset and that the final grade should represent their final mastery of topics in the course. Traditional grading systems tend to be too restrictive and hinder a growth mindset. They require strict deadlines that fail to easily account for student accommodations and learning differences. Furthermore, they run into averaging and scaling issues with 59% of a score counting as failing, making it difficult for students to redeem grades even if they later demonstrate mastery of topics. We designed a formative/summative grading system in our CS0 and CS1 classes for both on-campus and online students to support a structured growth mindset. Students can redo formative assignments and are provided flexible deadlines. They demonstrate their mastery in summative assignments. While being inspired by other grading systems, our system works seamlessly with auto-grading tools used in large, structured courses. Despite the flexibility, the courses provided a level of rigor before allowing students to continue onto the next course. Overall, 65% of students resubmitted assignments increasing their scores, participated in ungraded assignments, and used formative assignments for additional practice without a distinction between race or gender. These students went to the traditional follow-on CS2 course and 94% passed compared with 71% who took CS1 with a traditional grading system.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1931363
- PAR ID:
- 10448775
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 624 to 630
- 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
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3545945.3569810
