Completed 2022-2023 academic year
Future Academic Scholars in Teaching (FAST) fellowship

Description of Core Competency:
While students have their own interpretations about how they performed in a course (typically by looking at their grades), instructors know that students have performed well if they have met course objectives. The question is, how do we know that they've met course objectives? While exams seem to be the primary mode of assessment, are there other ways? Moreover, are there ways we can use assessment to inform educators of the efficacy of their teaching methods? The goal of this competency is to understand how to adequately assess student learning, and how to use those assessments to evaluate hypotheses about pedagogy.

Artifacts and Rationale
Motivation
From my experience as an educator, I knew that there were clear differences in grade outcomes across our students--some did well, and some did poorly, despite using empirically-supported pedagogy by implementing active learning activities. Based on my observations in the class, I know some students shut down and disengage from the active learning activities, claiming they cannot and will not understand them. I wondered if there was something I could do to prevent students from disengaging during these activities, since we know that active participation in these activities is heavily tied to course outcomes (Wilson et al., 2007) I wondered if there were methods I could use that would help my teaching meet the needs of all the students in my course. I began to research this question and discovered research around the importance of having a growth mindset (believing that intelligence is not a fixed trait). I wondered if implementing activities designed to increase a students growth mindset, alongside traditional active learning activities, could reduce achievement gaps across students. This inspired my "Teaching as Research" mentored project titled "Effects of Growth Mindset Interventions on Student Confidence and Academic Achievement".

Methods

For this study, we utilized two Introductory biology courses at a large R1 research institution, which covered topics from genes to ecosystems. Both sections met twice a week to conduct lectures, and intersperesed these lectures with problems for students to answer that assessed their ability to apply challenging concepts covered in the course. Both sections were identiacal through the first exam. After the first exam, one of the sections was exposed to growth mindset messaging (See sample powerpoint slides on the right). The first intervention was teaching students that the brain is constantly changing (neuroplasticity) to support that there is no biological basis for fixed intelligence (top image). Students were surveyed in both sections after this intervention. Two more times throughout the semester I implemented more growth mindset messaging, primarily through asking students to reflect on how challenging some activities were at the start of the unit, versus right before the exam, to illustrate neuroplasticity happening in real-time (bottom image).

Students volunteered to complete a survey three times during the semester to assess their biology self-efficacy (using the biology sel-effifacy assessment; Baldwin et al., 1999) and growth mindset (using the growth-mindset assessment; Dweck 2006), as well as provide demographic information. The first survey was given to students during the first week of classes, the second survey was given after the first intervention in the treatment lecture, and the third (Identical to the second) was given at the end of the semester. Participating students exam scores (three) were also collected, and their scores on questions that coresponded to concepts we emphasized in active learning activities was also collected.

Results

Students of color who were in the bottom 50% of scorers on the first exam saw a 19% increase in biology self-efficacy compared to similarly-identified students in the control

This did not correspond to an increase in exam scores: Students who saw the greatest increase in biology self-efficacy performed worse on the second exam than the first

Conclusions:
While analyses are still ongoing, preliminary results suggest that implementing low-investment lectures on neuroplasticity can increase students confidence in their ability to succeed in biology courses. This is especially true for students of color and students that struggle academically, who are the most likely to drop out of introductory college courses (Riegle-Crumb et al., 2019; Kiss et al., 2019). However, this did not correspond to increases in exam score grades, which could be interpreted in a few ways. The first is that students may not be good judges of their ability to perform well on exams, especially in their first few years (Besterfield-Sacre et al., 1998). Alternatively, students may be feeling more confident in their ability to perform well at some point in the future, even if that time is not now (that is, they are embracing the concept of neuroplasticity and acknowledging that forming these connections may take time). If the latter is true, studies have shown that students with greater self-efficacy are more likely to persist within a STEM major (Peguero 2015) , graduate (Larson et al., 2015), and pursue post-college employment within the STEM dicipline (Robinson et al., 2022). Thus, the long-term effects of this intervention may take years to play out. Future studies conducting qualitative interviews with students may help gain insight into the mechanisms driving the increase self-efficacy without increases in academic achievement.

Lit cited:
Baldwin, J. A., Ebert‐May, D., & Burns, D. J. (1999). The development of a college biology self‐efficacy instrument for nonmajors. Science education, 83(4), 397-408.

Besterfield-Sacre, M., Amaya, N. Y., Shuman, L. J., Atman, C. J., & Porter, R. L. (1998, November). Understanding student confidence as it relates to first year achievement. In FIE'98. 28th Annual Frontiers in Education Conference. Moving from'Teacher-Centered'to'Learner-Centered'Education. Conference Proceedings (Cat. No. 98CH36214) (Vol. 1, pp. 258-263). IEEE.

Dweck, C., Chiu, C., & Hong, Y. (1995). Implicit theories and their role in judgments and reactions: A word from two perspectives. Psychological Inquiry, 5(4), 267–285.

Kiss, B., Nagy, M., Molontay, R., & Csabay, B. (2019, November). Predicting dropout using high school and first-semester academic achievement measures. In 2019 17th international conference on emerging eLearning technologies and applications (ICETA) (pp. 383-389). IEEE.

Larson, L. M., Pesch, K. M., Surapaneni, S., Bonitz, V. S., Wu, T. F., & Werbel, J. D. (2015). Predicting graduation: The role of mathematics/science self-efficacy. Journal of Career Assessment, 23(3), 399-409.

Riegle-Crumb, C., King, B., & Irizarry, Y. (2019). Does STEM stand out? Examining racial/ethnic gaps in persistence across postsecondary fields. Educational Researcher, 48(3), 133-144.

Robinson, K. A., Perez, T., White-Levatich, A., & Linnenbrink-Garcia, L. (2022). Gender differences and roles of two science self-efficacy beliefs in predicting post-college outcomes. The Journal of Experimental Education, 90(2), 344-363.

Wilson, B. M., Pollock, P. H., & Hamann, K. (2007). Does active learning enhance learner outcomes? Evidence from discussion participation in online classes. Journal of Political Science Education, 3(2), 131-142.

Reflection
From this project, I learned a lot of things. First, implementing growth mindset activities is an effective way to increase students growth mindset and biology self-efficacy, even if it does not translate to higher exam scores. Second, by recording the outcomes of student assessment, I was able to empirically evaluate my teaching strategies. Often, the only feedback we get about teaching comes from student opinions--which are not always connected to how much they actually learn in class. It also gave me feedback from all students in my class (through exam scores) which meant I could see how my teaching strategies impacted all students. Finally, I learned the importance of backwards-designing assessments. I knew when I started I wanted to evaluate student achievement, but once I began to parse out my ideas I realized that what I REALLY wanted to know wasn't necessarily their overall understanding of concepts, but how well they were able to answer questions that corresponded to active learning activities we had done in class. This would allow me to directly test if growth mindset activities really did influence students' ability to focus intently on active learning activities in class.

Competency 5:

Methods

Results