Socialization of Elementary Students' Math Mind-Sets: Parents' Failure Mind-Sets and Messages

• In Event: Family, Friends, and Faculty: How Actual and Perceived Beliefs of Others Shape Students’ STEM Motivation

Abstract

Parents play an important role in how their children think about intelligence. This includes children’s beliefs about whether ability is a fixed trait, a fixed mindset, or something that can grow through effort, a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006). Although parents’ own mindsets do not reliably relate to their children’s, parents’ beliefs that failure is helpful in the learning process, a failure mindset, do (Haimovitz & Dweck, 2016). However, research has not demonstrated how parents’ failure mindsets cross-over into children’s mindsets about ability.
One way that parents socialize their children’s mindsets is through the messages they send after success and failure. Praising children’s personal attributes (e.g., “you are so smart”) following achievement tasks as opposed to the process of achievement (e.g., “you worked hard”) lead children to hold a fixed mindset about intelligence (Mueller & Dweck, 1998; Pomerantz & Kempner, 2013). We hypothesize that parents with failure mindsets are less likely to focus on personal attributes, because they see failure as part of a process of learning and not a sign of lack of ability.
The current study tested whether parents’ failure mindsets related to their use of person or process language around math and whether messages, in turn, predicted children’s fixed mindsets about math ability in early elementary school. Due to the inconsistent findings regarding whether young children possess broad theories about intelligence (e.g., Dweck, 2002; Gunderson et al., 2013), we focused on discipline-specific mindsets about math ability (Gunderson, Hamdan, Sorhagen, & D’Esterre, 2017). Math mindsets are particularly important to study because even young children often believe that not everyone is capable of learning math (Kloosterman & Cougan, 1994).
Participants were 175 parents (82% mothers) and their first-second grade children. Parents completed an online survey assessing failure mindsets (e.g., “The effects of failure in math are positive and should be utilized.,” α = .83) and their use of person messages (e.g., “Math is not for everyone,” α = .88) and process messages (e.g., “Let’s look over your work to see what might have happened,” α = .90) in response to children’s successes and failures in math. Experimenters interviewed children about how much they agree with math fixed mindset statements (e.g., “You really can’t do much to improve your math smarts.,” α = .60).
Structural equation modeling was used to examine the relations between parents’ mindsets, messages, and children’s mindsets (see Figure 1). Parents’ failure mindsets negatively predicted person messages (β = -.18, p = .018) but not process messages (β = -.01, p = .92). Person messages predicted children’s fixed mindsets (β = .21, p = .050), but process messages did not (β = .03, p = .80).
The results demonstrate that even in early elementary school, parents might socialize fixed mindsets about math via the messages that they send. Parents who believe failure can be useful in learning are less likely to send messages that personal attributes play a role in success and failure. This research provides insight into how parents might socialize adaptive math mindsets in their children.

Authors

• Michael M. Barger, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

• Dajung Oh, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

• Samantha Shah, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Andrei Cimpian

• Eva M. Pomerantz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign