This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and SBE's Science of Broadening Participation program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. David Yeager at The University of Texas at Austin, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating how teachers’ practices can support (or undermine) high-school students’ growth mindsets, the role of these practices in shaping students’ long-term persistence in the STEM pipeline, and the implications of these practices for broadening participation in STEM for underrepresented students. Many 9th grade students fail to progress to the 10th grade math courses that would keep them on track to graduate with a strong portfolio of math and science courses. Students with a growth mindset – the belief that academic ability is not fixed and can improve – are more likely to seek academic challenges and may therefore complete more advanced math and science courses throughout high school. Growth-mindset beliefs may be especially beneficial for students of color and students from working-class backgrounds (termed underrepresented here), who face barriers to success in these fields.
Two factors may promote a growth mindset in 9th grade math courses: (a) exposure to a teacher's growth-affording practices, which reinforce and reward growth-oriented behavior, and (b) receipt of a growth-mindset intervention, which employs attitude-change techniques to facilitate adoption of growth-mindset beliefs. In addition, these factors may interact: growth-mindset interventions may be more powerful when complemented by teacher practices that reinforce the message. By encouraging students to seek academic challenges, growth-affording practices and growth-mindset interventions may propel students to take more advanced math and science courses through 12th grade. The proposed research has the following objectives: (a) to test whether growth-affording practices affect 9th grade students' challenge-seeking predisposition and subsequent course taking, (b) to test whether these practices moderate growth-mindset intervention effects on these outcomes, and (c) to investigate how these practices alter intervention effects. To address these objectives, the PI will first conduct secondary analyses of the National Study of Learning Mindsets, a nationally-representative randomized-controlled trial of a growth-mindset intervention. These analyses will assess the effects of teachers' growth-affording practices, provision of a growth-mindset intervention, and their interaction on math and science course taking through 12th grade, and examine whether such effects are driven by changes to students' challenge-seeking predisposition. Second, the PI will manipulate growth-affording practices and provision of a growth-mindset intervention in a laboratory study to test the causal effects of these practices on students' challenge seeking. In each of these studies, the PI will test whether promoting a growth mindset is more beneficial for underrepresented students. Together, these studies will address pressing questions about experiences that promote growth mindsets, and how these experiences can promote preparation to enter the STEM fields in college. In addition, these studies will inform the development of teacher professional development activities and help determine the contextual conditions necessary for growth-mindset interventions to be effective.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
