How Student Dispositions Evolve in Response to Classroom Contexts

• In Event: Measuring Motivational Processes and Other Noncognitive Factors: Challenges and Advances in Connecting Research to Practice

Abstract

The field of educational psychology is focused on a number of concepts associated with success not only in school, but also in life more generally. Most of these concepts concern psychological mindsets and are measured by multi-item scales that are like snapshots—they take stock of a status at a particular point in time. Standard concepts include: academic efficacy, mastery orientation, performance orientation, self-esteem, self-concept on various dimensions, growth mindset (concerning beliefs about intelligence), and grit (concerning the propensity to stay focused or be relentless). Others that are less standard, concern the propensity to hide effort, to hold back effort in response to peer pressures, to feel anxiety (including stereotype anxiety), to feel academically satisfied with one’s own performance, and others.

In most of these cases, there is not a well-developed conceptual or empirical foundation for understanding changes over time. Researchers agree that contexts matter and they theorize that experiences in different contexts can change mindsets. Differences in responses across the contexts are considered to approximate the impacts of being in the respective contexts. Multivariate research using features of contexts to predict context-specific responses to surveys are used to estimate how strongly contexts affect the perceptions and attitudes that the surveys measure.

What is much less studied and understood are the ways that experiences in particular contexts predict the changes over time in psychological dispositions. The proposed presentation will cover initial results from a new survey in which items ask respondents to distinguish the type of people that they usually are—e.g., using the root: “I am the type of person who . . .,” and items that ask them to indicate the type of person that the class is helping them and their classmates to become—e.g., “In this class, students learn to be more . . .”

Our intention is to ask both types of questions of the same students over multiple survey deployments (cycles) in two or more classes per deployment, over the course of two or three years. Our hypothesis is that students who agree that they are learning to be particular types of people in their classes, will agree somewhat more in the latter years that they are the types of people that their classes were preparing them to be.

The presentation will cover the conceptual framing outlined above and some patterns in the first round of survey responses.

Author

• Ronald F. Ferguson, Harvard University