Developing a growth-mindset pedagogy for higher education and testing its efficacy

Abstract

Choosing the right teaching pedagogy is the first step a teacher can take to ensure that students retain course content. This research developed and tested a growth-mindset teaching pedagogy that helps undergraduate students develop a growth-mindset belief system about their own abilities. Students might believe that their personal attributes and qualities are carved in stone, a fixed mindset, or they might believe they can cultivate, grow, and improve them through their efforts, a growth mindset. To validate a psychology-based growth mindset pedagogy, a pretest-posttest control group design was used. We implemented this growth-mindset teaching pedagogy in 17 sections in two different courses, and we used 14 additional sections that utilized lecture style teaching as control groups. Students exposed to the growth-mindset teaching pedagogy improved their growth-mindset beliefs by 3.44% and decreased their fixed-mindset by 3.48% compared to lecture style teaching.