Poster #206 - Examining Grit and Mindset in Concurrent, and Gains, in Reading Comprehension: A Twin Study

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Previous research emphasizes non-cognitive/personality factors in predicting academic achievement (Yeager & Walton, 2011; Richardson et al., 2012). Specifically, psychological constructs of mindset and grit tap individual differences in student beliefs about ability and performance and both have been suggested to be positive indicators of achievement Dweck, 2006; Duckworth & Yeager, 2015). Further, some educational researchers suggest changing mindset, and/or grit, in children will lead to future educational gains (Alan et al., 2016). Here, we focus on student beliefs and performance in the domain of reading, as student attitudes may be especially important for reading achievement (Petscher, 2009). We assess the relation among mindset, grit, concurrent reading, and growth in reading, using regression and twin modeling techniques, to examine the role of student beliefs on concurrent reading achievement and future gains in reading achievement.
We used data from 431 twin pairs (173 monozygotic pairs, 258 dizygotic pairs; 55% female), drawn from two data collection waves of the Florida Twin Project on Reading, Behavior and Environment (Taylor et al., 2012). Participants completed Mindset related to intelligence (De Castella & Byrne, 2015), and grit (Duckworth et al., 2007) scales by self-report questionnaire at wave 1, and reading comprehension by the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests at wave 1 and 2 (wave 1 Mage = 13.30yrs, wave 2 age Mage = 15.24yrs).
Examining the correlation among the measures, mindset was correlated with both waves of reading comprehension (r = .26, .19), but grit was not significantly correlated with reading comprehension at either wave (r = .06, .07). Therefore, grit was removed from any further modeling. Subsequently, two multiple regressions were conducted, using only one randomly chosen member of the twin pair (Table 1). First, gender, age, and mindset were regressed onto wave 1 reading comprehension. Mindset was a significant predictor, accounting for 4% of the variance of concurrent reading comprehension. Second, gender, age, wave 1 reading comprehension, and mindset were regressed onto wave 2 reading comprehension. Only concurrent reading comprehension was a significant predictor of gains in reading comprehension, indicating mindset did not contribute to change in reading comprehension performance across two years.
As a second step, a trivariate Cholesky decomposition was applied to the full twin data, producing three sets of genetic and environmental factors (Table 2). The only significant overlap between mindset and reading comprehension was through the nonshared environment, and mirroring the regression results, was only seen between mindset and concurrent reading comprehension.
We set out to determine the relation of mindset and grit in predicting concurrent reading comprehension, and gains in reading comprehension. In total, there was surprisingly little overlap between the personality factors of mindset and grit with reading comprehension, concurrently and two years later. We found no support for the idea that student beliefs are associated with gains in reading comprehension, which raises concerns about the likelihood of changing student beliefs to change achievement. The finding that mindset was associated with concurrent reading comprehension through child-specific environmental factors was interesting, and needs to be further explored.

Authors

• LaTasha Holden, Florida State University
  Presenting Author

• Kimberly Martinez, Florida State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sara Hart, Florida State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jeanette Taylor, Florida State University
  Non-Presenting Author