Shifting Mindsets: SenseMaker as a disciplinary literacies and reasoning

• In Event: Sense-Making in the Disciplines: Literacy Resource for Interrogating Past and Future As Teacher Pedagogical Tool

Abstract

51 10th and 12th grade multi-ethnic students in literature and 106 11th graders in history completed several pre-post established measures on epistemology re literature and history, growth mindset, and learning goals. Research Question1 – Shifts in students’ disciplinary reasoning from pre to post; 2 – Relationships among psycho-social variables and pre-post outcomes; differences by teacher.
In literature and history, students read disciplinary text sets with tasks assessing skills in disciplinary comprehension (interpreting relations across multiple texts) and reasoning (claims with evidence and warrants). Using tasks validated from an earlier IES funded project, we sought to disentangle students’ abilities to comprehend from abilities to convey arguments in writing, using charts to organize their claims, evidence and reasoning and then moving to write essays that transform the chart data into essays. Rubrics also validated from earlier IES project focused on evidence, reasoning and organization for charts and essays. We sought to examine how students’ shifts regarding epistemological beliefs about literature and history, their learning goals and beliefs about effort correlated with pe-post comprehension changes. All these surveys have been empirically validated in other research (see citations). Our researchers analyzed pre-post tasks using criteria from rubrics for argumentation previously validated, with established inter-rater reliability. We disentangled student outcomes by teacher to examine influences of teachers’ pedagogical choices and other contextual data around professional development and teacher planning foci. Quantitative analyses were conducted in SPSS using paired samples t-tests (RQ1) and ANCOVA (RQ2).
Findings:
Overall, for history and literature we found positive outcomes measured by change scores from pre to post; although there were not consistent changes from pre to post around epistemology (history and literature), beliefs about intelligence, and goals for learning were positively correlated with cognitive outcomes. Among important distinctions, results indicated students’ beliefs about having fixed ability before the intervention explained outcomes more than pre-essay scores.
For literature there were not significant differences in pre-post essays between 10th and 12th graders, taught by the same teacher. However, 12th graders scored higher on planning for writing. There were no significant pre-post changes on literary epistemology by grade, except 10th graders had greater shifts for the social function of literature. This may be a function of literary texts taught in instructional units. However, for history we found significant differences across teachers.
Overall for history and literature we found positive outcomes measured by pre-post change scores. We also found that although there were not consistent changes from pre to post around epistemology (history and literature), beliefs about intelligence, and goals for learning, as psycho-social beliefs and dispositions were positively correlated with cognitive outcomes.
Significance:
Findings document positive impacts of the structural supports in the SMD tool on disciplinary literacies and reasoning in literature and history; the salience of psycho-social beliefs around epistemology and growth mindset matter; the significance of teachers’ conceptual and pedagogical understandings of these processes for student learning and development; how the structural designs within the SMD tool and the professional learning community model for how teachers’ take up these resources matter.

Author

• Mariya Yukhymenko, California State University - Fresno