How does implementing a growth mindset culture into the classroom affect the achievement of middle school science students?

Seminar Title

How does implementing a growth mindset culture into the classroom affect the achievement of middle school science students?

Growth Mindset

Middle School

Middle School

Science

All Disciplines

“I am not smart, I don’t get it, I’m not good at science, math, reading, etc.” How often do you hear these comments from your students? I use to hear them all of the time, but not anymore. My students now recognize that success takes effort and practice, and have started helping encourage each other through mistakes and failures. My research could relate to any grade level, but the buy in of growth mindset with students is more likely in elementary and middle school. Any subject teacher could benefit from the discussion of how implementing growth mindset in the classroom affects the achievement of students. If you are looking to increase motivation and help your students who struggle when they make mistakes, this is the session for you!

How does implementing a growth mindset culture into the classroom affect the achievement of middle school science students? How does implementing a growth mindset culture into the classroom affect the achievement of middle school science students? After researching about implementing a growth mindset into the classroom, I decided to focus on three themes, to build a growth mindset in my students, (1) teach the students about their brain, (2) teach them about the value of making mistakes and taking risks, and (3) teach them, and use, growth mindset praise and feedback. Implementation included: (1) Class Dojo videos about each theme (2) activities about how the brain grows, famous people who continued to work through and after failures, and how changing our fixed mindset language to growth mindset language can foster success (3) class discussions on how we can apply our learning about growth mindset to education, sports, and outside of school. Based on my experiment, I believe there is no significant difference in assessment scores, when students have a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. What I do think to be true is that student moral increases, along with the motivation to complete and redo activities and assignments. These positive increases, help save time, and increase production, since the teacher spends less time redirecting students back to learning. Further research to consider, based on this experiment would be to implement growth mindset curriculum in some of the class periods, but not all. After implementation, give the growth mindset quizzes and the unit assessment. Finally see if the growth mindset quiz scores correlate differently with the unit assessment scores, based on implementation or not in the specific class.