Capacities to Achieve: Positive Teaching Mindsets and Student Achievement in First Grade

• In Event: 523 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 22. Teachers, Postsecondary Education, and Career Choices

Abstract

This paper aims to identify a causal relationship between teaching mindsets and student achievement in first grade. Teaching mindsets are defined as teachers’ expectations for student gains, which may reflect teachers’ evaluations of their capacity to teach or their students’ capacity to learn. Support for a causal relationship between teaching mindsets and student achievement is particularly strong in first grade because (1) younger students are enthusiastic about schooling, precluding a reverse causal argument, (2) students are somewhat randomly sorted into classrooms and spend their whole day under the instruction of a single teacher, which reduces the risk of selection bias or cumulative (dis)advantage, and (3) I find evidence that school organizational culture can influence teaching mindsets, net of the composition of the student body. Multilevel analyses focus on two dimensions of teaching mindsets, based on a set of questions from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K:2011), which I call Teacher Capacities and Student Capacities. Students whose teachers have more positive mindsets on the second measure perform better in reading, net of student background and school characteristics. This effect is strongest in schools where teachers are most likely to have low expectations for student achievement: public schools serving poor districts. Thus, rather than focusing on the resources and mindsets that students bring with them to school, this paper suggests that education research and policy efforts may be more effectively targeted towards teachers.

Author

• Veronique Irwin, Berkeley