Growth Mindset Cultures Support Diversity, Persistence, and Performance in STEM
For more than twenty years, growth mindset has been studied at the individual level— how people’s personal beliefs about the fixedness or malleability of human characteristics like intelligence affect their own motivation and behavior. This talk will feature a research program that takes a different tack by examining mindset as a cultural factor. Termed, organizational mindset, I will examine faculty’s beliefs about students’ intelligence, talent, and ability influence students’ motivation and performance. I will show how organizational mindset is communicated through our classroom policies, practices, interactions, and leadership messages, and I will discuss how these fixed mindset “Cultures of Genius” vs. growth mindset “Cultures of Growth” are created and sustained. I will present data from several studies with college faculty and students that demonstrate the role of organizational mindset for students’ motivation and performance and I will show how organizational mindset is critical for everyone, but is particularly important for the motivational and performance outcomes of underrepresented students (e.g., women in STEM, racial-ethnic minority students, lower SES students, first-generation college students, and transfer students). I conclude by sharing a large scale six institution faculty-focused intervention that helped faculty create more inclusive Cultures of Growth—and the implications for students’ psychological experiences in class and their end-of-term grades. I’ll conclude with some thoughts about how to adopt evidence-based approaches to fostering more inclusive, growth-minded classroom cultures in order to accelerate inclusion and performance.