University Of Texas At Austin Research Finds Teachers With Brief Growth Mindset Training Can Improve Outcomes For Disadvantaged Students
A brief intervention encouraging high school teachers to adopt “growth mindset” classroom practices can improve grades and pass rates for disadvantaged students, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin. Growth mindset culture is characterized by the idea that students’ intellectual abilities, rather than being innate and fixed, can improve with the investment of time and effort.
The study, published in PNAS, focused on dual enrollment programs, where high school students can take college-level courses and simultaneously earn high school and college credits. Such courses can give students a head start on earning a college degree, but students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds often fail them, so the benefits go primarily to students from more advantaged backgrounds.
Rather than targeting disadvantaged students directly, the new intervention was delivered to teachers in the form of a 45-minute online module that encouraged them to adopt practices that foster a growth mindset classroom culture. 155 teachers with a total of 5,393 students received the intervention while an additional 164 teachers with 6,167 students received an unrelated control module.
“Many interventions focus on changing individual students themselves, encouraging them to alter their beliefs or interpretation of specific situations,” says Cameron Hecht, a postdoctoral scholar at UT’s Population Research Center and the paper’s lead author. “We instead encouraged teachers to change aspects of their approach to teaching. This can help to change educational contexts for the better while relieving students of the burden of change.”
The study was co-authored by UT associate professor of psychology David Yeager and Christopher Bryan, assistant professor in the Department of Business, Government, and Society at the McCombs School of Business. Teachers were evaluated before and shortly after the intervention to assess their plans to employ growth mindset teaching practices with their students, as well as their growth mindset beliefs. Student pass rates and class grades were assessed six to seven months after the intervention.
Teachers who received the intervention were more likely to report plans to implement growth mindset practices in their classrooms than those in the control group. The intervention improved pass rates by 11 percentage points and course grades by 0.36 grade points in classes with a high proportion of students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, with a much smaller effect in classrooms with a high proportion of students from socioeconomically privileged backgrounds, significantly reducing achievement inequalities between the two groups.
The intervention was developed using a values alignment approach, which motivates behavioral change by associating the desired behavior with core values shared by those in the subject group. In this case the relevant core value, identified through interviews and a nationally representative survey of teachers, was inspiring students’ enthusiastic engagement with learning. The study aimed to change teaching practices rather than teachers’ underlying beliefs because the latter cannot be observed by students. However, the authors found that the intervention increased teachers’ growth mindset beliefs in addition to their plans to implement growth mindset practices. Prior growth mindset interventions focused on changing student beliefs rather than teaching practices in part because of the challenges of convincing overworked teachers to alter their methods.
“Most attempts to develop brief, scalable interventions to change teachers’ practices have failed, largely because most teachers are overburdened and unsolicited suggestions from administrators or outside experts threaten to upset the balance they’ve already struck between competing priorities,” notes Hecht. “This work shows that values alignment can help to overcome this behavior-change challenge, even among teachers who are often among the most overworked and overwhelmed professionals.”