109,657 research outputs found
Exploring Mindset's Applicability to Students' Experiences with Challenge in Transformed College Physics Courses
The mindset literature is a longstanding area of psychological research
focused on beliefs about intelligence, response to challenge, and goals for
learning (Dweck, 2000). However, the mindset literature's applicability to the
context of college physics has not been widely studied. In this paper we narrow
our focus toward students' descriptions of their responses to challenge in
college physics. We ask the research questions, "can we see responses to
challenge in college physics that resemble that of the mindset literature?" and
"how do students express evidence of challenge and to what extent is such
evidence reflective of challenges found in the mindset literature?" To answer
these questions, we developed a novel coding scheme for interview dialogue
around college physics challenge and students' responses to it. In this paper
we present the development process of our coding scheme. We find that it is
possible to see student descriptions of challenge that resemble the mindset
literature's characterizations. However, college physics challenges are
frequently different than those studied in the mindset literature. We show
that, in the landscape of college physics challenges, mindset beliefs cannot
always be considered to be the dominant factor in how students respond to
challenge. Broadly, our coding scheme helps the field move beyond broad
Likert-scale survey measures of students' mindset beliefs
- …