An official website of the United States government
While many previous studies have indicated that encouraging a growth mindset can improve student learning outcomes, this conclusion’s applicability to college-level astronomy classrooms remains poorly understood owing to the variation in students’ overall and domain-specific learning attitudes. To address this, we surveyed undergraduate students in an introductory astronomy class about their attitudes towards learning astronomy over the course of five semesters. Overall, students felt an affinity for astronomy, felt moderately competent, perceived astronomy to be intermediate in terms of difficulty, and agreed strongly with standard statements reflecting a “growth mindset,” i.e., the belief that intelligence is malleable rather than fixed from birth. Their responses were stable over the course of the semester and did not appear to depend strongly on student demographics. The unexpected start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated shift to all-virtual learning correlated with a drop in their affinity for astronomy, a small decrease in their perceived competence, and an increase in the perceived difficulty of the topic. Their overall learning mindset showed negligible change during this time, emphasizing the stability of their belief in a growth mindset as compared to other measured learning attitudes. However, more nuanced questions about their behaviors and interpretations in the classroom, about how they felt “in the moment,” and about what factors were most important for their success in the class revealed significantly lower alignment with a growth mindset. This suggests that while introductory astronomy students may believe that they have a growth mindset, this mindset is not necessarily reflected in their self-reported classroom behaviors or measured responses to actual learning challenges. Published by the American Physical Society2024
more »
« less
Examining Engineering Students’ Shift in Mindsets Over the Course of a Semester: A Longitudinal Study
Students (like all people) have elements of both growth and fixed mindsets. We studied shifts in both types of student mindsets over three one-semester courses. We found no significant change in students’ growth mindset at the beginning of the semester compared to the end of the semester. However, students’ fixed mindsets showed a statistically significant increase from the beginning of the semester to the end of the semester. Two multilevel models were used to understand why students’ fixed mindsets may have increased 1) personal sourcesmastery goal, performance goal, and internal recognition, and 2) situational sourcesclassroom goal orientations and external recognition. Students’ endorsement of a performance goal orientation, which focuses on demonstrating competence and managing others’ perception of their abilities, increased their fixed mindset views at the end of the semester. In the model focused on situational sources, we found that students’ fixed mindset increased when they perceived their classroom environment endorsed a performance-approach goal structure and by receiving external recognition. When comparing both models, students’ fixed mindset increase was largely explained by classroom environmental sources. Specifically, students’ fixed mindsets increased when they perceived that their classroom environment valued a demonstration of competence (i.e., classroom performance-approach). Being recognized as an engineer by peers and instructors also increased students’ fixed views of their abilities. Conversely, one situational source was found to decrease students’ fixed mindset views, i.e., a classroom environment that promotes mastery goals. Our study points to an apparent and crucial role engineering classroom environments have in promoting certain mindsets. The study concludes with one pedagogical strategy that may help mitigate the inadvertent promotion of a fixed mindset, e.g., a mastery learning pedagogical intervention.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2122941
- PAR ID:
- 10466703
- Publisher / Repository:
- 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
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.more » « less
-
A growth-mindset intervention teaches the belief that intellectual abilities can be developed. Where does the intervention work best? Prior research examined school-level moderators using data from the National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM), which delivered a short growth-mindset intervention during the first year of high school. In the present research, we used data from the NSLM to examine moderation by teachers’ mindsets and answer a new question: Can students independently implement their growth mindsets in virtually any classroom culture, or must students’ growth mindsets be supported by their teacher’s own growth mindsets (i.e., the mindset-plus-supportive-context hypothesis)? The present analysis (9,167 student records matched with 223 math teachers) supported the latter hypothesis. This result stood up to potentially confounding teacher factors and to a conservative Bayesian analysis. Thus, sustaining growth-mindset effects may require contextual supports that allow the proffered beliefs to take root and flourish.more » « less
-
We have investigated the temporal patterns of algebra (N ¼ 606) and calculus (N ¼ 507) introductory physics students practicing multiple basic physics topics several times throughout the semester using an online mastery homework application called science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fluency aimed at improving basic physics skills. For all skill practice categories, we observed an increase in measures of student accuracy, such as a decrease in the number of questions attempted to reach mastery, and a decrease in response time per question, resulting in an overall decrease in the total time spent on the assignments. The findings in this study show that there are several factors that impact a student’s performance and evolution on the mastery assignments throughout the semester. For example, using linear mixed modeling, we report that students with lower math preparation for the physics class start with lower accuracy and slower response times on the mastery assignments than students with higher math preparation. However, by the end of the semester, the less prepared students reach similar performance levels to their more prepared classmates on the mastery assignments. This suggests that STEM fluency is a useful tool for instructors to implement to refresh student’s basic math skills. Additionally, gender and procrastination habits impact the effectiveness and progression of the student’s response time and accuracy on the STEM fluency assignments throughout the semester. We find that women initially answer more questions in the same amount of time as men before reaching mastery. As the semester progresses and students practice the categories more, this performance gap diminishes between males and females. In addition, we find that students who procrastinate (those who wait until the final few hours to complete the assignments) are spending more time on the assignments despite answering a similar number of questions as compared to students who do not procrastinate. We also find that student mindset (growth vs fixed mindset) was not related to a student’s progress on the online mastery assignments. Finally, we find that STEM fluency practice improves performance beyond the effects of other components of instruction, such as lectures, group-work recitations, and homework assignments.more » « less
-
Undergraduate programs in computer science (CS) face high dropout rates, and many students struggle while learning to program. Studies show that perceived programming ability is a significant factor in students' decision to major in CS. Fortunately, psychology research shows that promoting the growth mindset, or the belief that intelligence grows with effort, can improve student persistence and performance. However, mindset interventions have been less successful in CS than in other domains. We conducted a small-scale interview study to explore how CS students talk about their intelligence, mindsets, and programming behaviors. We found that students' mindsets rarely aligned with definitions in the literature; some present mindsets that combine fixed and growth attributes, while others behave in ways that do not align with their mindsets. We also found that students frequently evaluate their self-efficacy by appraising their programming intelligence, using surprising criteria like typing speed and ease of debugging to measure ability. We conducted a survey study with 103 students to explore these self-assessment criteria further, and found that students use varying and conflicting criteria to evaluate intelligence in CS. We believe the criteria that students choose may interact with mindsets and impact their motivation and approach to programming, which could help explain the limited success of mindset interventions in CS.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
