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1. Enhancing Undergraduate Student Success in STEM Fields through Growth-Mindset and Grit

   https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci10100279  

   Hacisalihoglu, Gokhan; Stephens, Desmond; Stephens, Sonya; Johnson, Lewis; Edington, Maurice (October 2020, Education Sciences)

   null (Ed.)

   Concern about graduation rates in higher education has led universities to offer courses that help students develop success skills. Scientist Life Skills, a new course for freshman at Florida A&M University, focuses on helping students matriculate into majors via development of growth mindset, grit, and critical thinking. Here, we assessed the outcomes of this course and explored the associations between building life skills and student success. A series of mindset, grit, and critical-thinking assessment measures were used to collect data before and after the course. Our results showed that the new course achieved its intended goals of providing STEM students with a set of tools that help them seamlessly transition into the university and successfully matriculate through their majors. Specifically, the course design significantly moved students toward a growth-mindset, increased their critical thinking, and their second-semester grade point averages (GPAs). This model life skills course can be adopted in non-STEM areas as well. 

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2. MBL (Mastery-Based Learning) Supports a Normalization of Failure as an Essential Part of Learning

   DeGoede, Kurt M; Read-Daily, Brenda; Koh, Rachel (July 2024, American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference)

   The positive benefits of fostering a Growth Mindset in students have been widely reported. Developing the skill of persisting through and learning from failure is key to developing a growth mindset and the entrepreneurial mindset – KEEN (Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network). This work-in-progress paper will examine how an MBL model could be a valuable tool for developing our students’ Failure Mindset. The MBL framework we employ is centered on learning through practice and coaching – making mistakes and learning from those mistakes, frequent low-stakes assessments, analyzing the results for further practice, and coaching on that skill or before moving forward to the next skill. A positive Failure Mindset looks at failure as a positive outcome that enhances one’s opportunities for learning. In this study, we will explore preliminary data by examining three groups of students: • entering first-year students, including those enrolled in an MBL course and those not enrolled in this course, • third-year students enrolled in an MBL course – 90% of these students have previously taken at least one MBL course, • and students enrolled in a one-semester off-campus alternative MBL-assessed project-based learning curriculum. We will use an established tool for assessing Failure Mindset and test the following hypotheses. • H1 – At initial assessment, students in 3rd-year students will exhibit a higher propensity toward a positive Failure Mindset than the entering first-year students. • H2 – The measure of Failure Mindset will increase over the course of the semester for all 3 groups of students. • H3 – the 1st year students in the MBL course will exhibit a more positive failure mindset at the end of the semester than those not enrolled in an MBL course. 

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3. Prevalence of a growth mindset among introductory astronomy students

   https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.20.010140  

   Prescott, Moire K_M; Madson, Laura; Way, Sandra M; Sanderson, Kelly N (May 2024, Physical Review Physics Education Research)

   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 

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4. A Semester-long Holistic Growth-Mindset Experience for First-Year Computing Students: Emerging Intersections

   Mason, S; Fluet, K (October 2024, IEEE Frontiers in Education)

   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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5. Investigating the Relations between Students’ Chemistry Mindset, Self-Efficacy, and Goal Orientation in General and Organic Chemistry Lecture Courses

   https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.3c00929  

   Naibert, Nicole; Mooring, Suazette R; Barbera, Jack (February 2024, Journal of Chemical Education)

   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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