An official website of the United States government
Abstract This study explores how caregiver–child scientific conversation during storybook reading focusing on the challenges or achievements of famous female scientists impacts preschoolers' mindset, beliefs about success, and persistence. Caregiver–child dyads (N = 202, 100 female, 35% non‐White, aged 4–5, ƒ = .15) were assigned to one of three storybook conditions, highlighting the female scientist'sachievements,effort, or, in abaselinecondition, neither. Children were asked about their mindset, presented with a persistence task, and asked about their understanding of effort and success. Findings demonstrate that storybooks highlightingeffortare associated with growth mindset, attribution of success to hard work, and increased persistence. Caregiver language echoed language from the assigned storybook, showing the importance of reading storybooks emphasizing hard work.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on June 2, 2026
Building Growth Mindset Using Lessons from Sports in Out-of-School Settings
In sports, youth are coached to see persistence and hard work as important paths to personal improvement and success. They come to understand through practice that mistakes are tools to help them improve and that collaboration and teamwork are keys to success in team sports (Kovács & Szakál, 2024; Rottensteiner et al., 2015). These ideas about the importance of effort, persistence, mistakes, and collaboration are important components of a growth mindset, the belief that ability is not fixed but can be improved through effort (Dweck & Yeager, 2020). People with a growth mindset view challenges and mistakes as opportunities to learn; they believe that success depends on effort and practice. Further, research shows that a growth mindset is associated with learner persistence and has positive effects on learning in school and beyond, including in sports (Biddle et al., 1996; Blackwell et al., 2007; Dweck 2006). However, young people who have a growth mindset in sports may not extend it to subjects such as mathematics and science (Chan et al., 2022; Kyler & Moscicki, 2024). In this paper, we describe a strategy of combining growth mindset principles, mathematics concepts, and sports examples to support students in shifting their mindsets about their own abilities. We share outcomes from implementing these activities at five out-of-school settings.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2005793
- PAR ID:
- 10626684
- Publisher / Repository:
- Afterschool Matters
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Afterschool matters
- Volume:
- 39
- ISSN:
- 2690-2729
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 41-52
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Growth mindset, informal learning, youth, baseball
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
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.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Developing a growth mindset has been identified as a key strategy for increasing youth achievement, motivation, and resiliency (Rattan et al. 2015). At its core, growth mindset describes the idea that one’s abilities can change through using new learning strategies and receiving appropriate mentoring (Dweck 2008). In contrast, a fixed mindset relates to the idea that ability is inherent and cannot be changed. We have taken up the concept of growth mindset and developed it specifically for the context of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math), a growing area of focus in both in- and out-of-school learning. We think of STEAM as more than just adding art to STEM or STEM to art—instead, we view STEAM as an approach that involves deep integration of overlapping art and STEM practices. Combining STEAM and the concept of mindset is especially helpful for intentionally bringing recognized identity-building features of out-of-school environments into the classroom, such as a sense of playfulness, open-ended exploration, and personal relevance. In this article we discuss our rationale and process in developing the concept of a “STEAM mindset” and illustrate how it can support youth and educator learning. Built on the foundations of the growth mindset concept, a STEAM mindset further emphasizes the ideas of quieting the inner negative voice, engaging in self-compassion rather than judgement, and promoting creative practice, as described in the sections below.more » « less
-
Mathematics is an important tool in engineering practice, as mathematical rules govern many designed systems (e.g., Nathan et al., 2013; Nathan et al., 2017). Investigations of structural engineers suggest that mathematical modelling is ubiquitous in their work, but the nature of the tasks they confront is not well-represented in the K-12 classroom (e.g., Gainsburg, 2006). This follows a larger literature base suggesting that school mathematics is often inauthentic and does represent how mathematics is used in practice. At the same time, algebra is a persistent gatekeeper to careers in engineering (e.g., Harackiewicz et al., 2012; Olson & Riordan, 2012). In the present study, we interviewed 12 engineers, asking them a series of questions about how they use specific kinds of algebraic function (e.g., linear, exponential, quadratic) in their work. The purpose of these interviews was to use the responses to create mathematical scenarios for College Algebra activities that would be personalized to community college students’ career interests. This curriculum would represent how algebra is used in practice by STEM professionals. However, our results were not what we expected. In this paper, we discuss three major themes that arose from qualitative analyses of the interviews. First, we found that engineers resoundingly endorsed the importance of College Algebra concepts for their day-to-day work, and uniformly stated that math was vital to engineering. However, the second theme was that the engineers struggled to describe how they used functions more complex than linear (i.e., y=mx+b) in their work. Students typically learn about linear functions prior to College Algebra, and in College Algebra explore more complex functions like polynomial, logarithmic, and exponential. Third, we found that engineers rarely use the explicit algebraic form of an algebraic function (e.g., y=3x+5), and instead rely on tables, graphs, informal arithmetic, and computerized computation systems where the equation is invisible. This was surprising, given that the bulk of the College Algebra course involves learning how to use and manipulate these formal expressions, learning skills like factoring, simplifying, solving, and interpreting parameters. We also found that these trends for engineers followed trends we saw in our larger sample where we interviewed professionals from across STEM fields. This study calls into question the gatekeeping role of formal algebraic courses like College Algebra for STEM careers. If engineers don’t actually use 75% of the content in these courses, why are they required? One reason might be that the courses are simply outdated, or arguments might be made that learning mathematics builds more general modelling and problem-solving skills. However, research from educational psychology on the difficulty of transfer would strongly refute this point – people tend to learn things that are very specific. Another reason to consider is that formal mathematics courses like advanced algebra have emerged as a very convenient mechanism to filter people by race, gender, and socioeconomic background, and to promote the maintenance of the “status quo” inequality in STEM fields. This is a critical issue to investigate for the future of the field of engineering as a whole.more » « less
-
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 Society2024more » « less
