Poster #67 - A Teacher’s Role in Mindset Development: The Influence of Feedback on Early Elementary Students

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

Growth Mindset is the idea that one can grow one’s intelligence with hard work and effort. Those with a growth mindset tend to persist through challenges and to see them as an opportunity for growth and learning rather than a defeat and a signal to quit (Dweck, 2007). This can lead to increased motivation and persistence in relation to academic subjects (Blackwell et al., 2007). Although many schools have adopted a growth mindset approach to learning and teaching (Dweck, 2017), they often have an incomplete understanding of the intricacies involved with implementing curricula and practices associated with it in their specific contexts. This can lead to teachers and administrators encouraging students to persevere but not helping them to find and develop strategies to successfully persist through challenges. Feedback is an integral part of how teachers and parents communicate with children and have an opportunity to shape their mindsets. As a result, research has investigated the role of feedback on students’ mindset, although the concept of feedback is rarely defined in these studies. In the current work, I have adopted Tunstall and Gipps’ (1996) concept of feedback, which they define as a “process of appraising, judging or evaluating students' work or performance and using this to shape and improve students' competence” (389).
Much of existing research focused on pre-planned feedback either in lab settings or in controlled interventions. Compared with naturalistic observational studies, the feedback used in these experimental studies is often overly elaborate (e.g., "Wow, you did very well on these problems. You got [number of problems] right. That's a really high score. You must be smart at these problems." (Mueller & Dweck, 1998) vs. that offered in an observational study, “good job” (Gunderson et al., 2013). In addition, feedback has typically been restricted to a limited number of categories: e.g., “person feedback” which focuses on a person’s attributes or traits ( “you’re so good at math”) vs. “process feedback” which focuses on a person’s strategies (“you worked hard to solve that math problem”) (Kamins & Dweck, 1999). This work points to a clear need for observational studies of teachers interacting with their students in the classroom to ascertain what types of feedback teachers are actually capable of giving and whether that feedback can easily fit into these limited categories. To begin to address this need, I analyzed first grade math lessons in a variety of classrooms with the goal of more accurately defining feedback and developing an observational tool to assist researchers conducting naturalistic research within the classroom. The concept of “feedback” was operationalized into a typology (adapted from Tunstall & Gipps, 1996. See Figure 1 for typology and occurrences of each) rather than as a more simplistic person/process feedback dichotomy that has been most commonly used. In this analysis, I documented both the types of feedback used and the context surrounding that feedback. I will discuss how it compares to previous experimental studies and the direction that naturalistic observational research should take in this area.

Author

• Katy Curry, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author