Growth Mindset

Commitment to Learning

Positive Values

Positive Identity

Growth mindset, or the belief that intelligence is not a fixed trait but one that can improve, is shown to be positively correlated with student achievement scores (Bostwick, Collie, Martin, & Durksen, 2017; Dweck, 2006). Students’ mindsets can influence how they react to stressful situations, failures and challenges. Having a growth mindset is associated with more adaptive coping and learning strategies after failure. Alternately, a fixed mindset leads students to disengage from their challenges and feel helpless (Dweck & Leggett, 1988). Fortunately, a student’s mindset is malleable. Here are some strategies to help your students change the way they see themselves in relation to challenging coursework.

• Teach students how to use mistakes/failures to their advantage.
• Let students see you make mistakes, then show them how you use those mistakes to learn.
• Struggle with concepts in front of students and allow them to help you work through the process.
• Explicitly talk with students about learning and deliberate practice.
• Discuss and model self-regulation strategies for learning and applying content. (See sidebar.)
• Focus less on competition and performance and more on learning and mastery. Examples include:
  • Not grading exams or other assignments based on a normal distribution.
  • Allowing students to retake exams or parts of exams to learn from mistakes.
  • Allowing students to rewrite papers or redo projects based on feedback provided.
  • Having students take exams both individually and in groups.
  • Giving students choices in how they demonstrate knowledge and mastery of content.
• Build in different ways for students to demonstrate learning and mastery of content. Examples include:
  • Using a variety of assignment types—exams, papers, presentations, videos, etc.
  • Letting students choose how they demonstrate their learning within individual assignments (e.g., creating a video, writing a paper, giving a presentation).
  • Allowing students to choose whether they work on assignments individually, in groups or with partners.
  • Allowing for students to fix mistakes and work through problems they’ve encountered so they can see the progress being made.
  • Letting students know you don’t want perfection. Do this by using words like “learning” and “growing,” rather than “achievement” or “performance.”

Self-Regulation Strategies to Model

• Setting goals and monitoring progress toward those goals.
• Using self-talk effectively to motivate and support active learning.
• Creating time management plans to accomplish goals.
• Thinking about your approach, identifying misconceptions, and doing something to fix those misconceptions.
• Becoming aware of your emotions, such as anxiety and using techniques to address them.

Mistakes play a vital role in nurturing creativity and exploration in the learning process. Fortunately, occasional errors surface during my lectures, often caught by my students. I favor a collaborative class style where we collectively engage in exploring and understanding intriguing concepts together.

- Alex Dimakis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering