Mindsets, contexts, and college enrollment: Taking the long view on growth mindset beliefs at the transition to high school.

Socioeconomic disparities in academic progress have persisted throughout the history of the United States, and growth mindset interventions-which shift beliefs about the malleability of intelligence-have shown promise in reducing these disparities. Both the study of such disparities and how to remedy them can benefit from taking the "long view" on adolescent development, following the tradition of John Schulenberg. To do so, this study focuses on the role of growth mindsets in short-term academic progress during the transition to high school as a contributor to longer-term educational attainment.

When do the effects of single-session interventions persist? Testing the mindset + supportive context hypothesis in a longitudinal randomized trial.

Background: Single-session interventions have the potential to address young people's mental health needs at scale, but their effects are heterogeneous. We tested whether the hypothesis could help explain when intervention effects persist or fade over time. The hypothesis posits that interventions are more effective in environments that support the intervention message.

A prosocial value intervention in gateway STEM courses.

Many college students, especially first-generation and underrepresented racial/ethnic minority students, desire courses and careers that emphasize helping people and society. Can instructors of introductory science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses promote motivation, performance, and equity in STEM fields by emphasizing the prosocial relevance of course material? We developed, implemented, and evaluated a prosocial utility-value intervention (UVI): A course assignment in which students were asked to reflect on the prosocial value of biology or chemistry course content; our focus was on reducing performance gaps between first-generation and continuing generation college students. In Studies 1a and 1b, we piloted two versions of a prosocial UVI in introductory biology ( = 282) and chemistry classes ( = 1,705) to test whether we could encourage students to write about the prosocial value of course content.

Shifting the mindset culture to address global educational disparities.

Educational outcomes remain highly unequal within and across nations. Students' mindsets-their beliefs about whether intellectual abilities can be developed-have been identified as a potential lever for making adolescents' academic outcomes more equitable. Recent research, however, suggests that intervention programs aimed at changing students' mindsets should be supplemented by programs aimed at the changing the mindset culture, which is defined as the shared set of beliefs about learning in a school or classroom.

Mindset × Context: Schools, Classrooms, and the Unequal Translation of Expectations into Math Achievement.

When do adolescents' dreams of promising journeys through high school translate into academic success? This monograph reports the results of a collaborative effort among sociologists and psychologists to systematically examine the role of schools and classrooms in disrupting or facilitating the link between adolescents' expectations for success in math and their subsequent progress in the early high school math curriculum. Our primary focus was on gendered patterns of socioeconomic inequality in math and how they are tethered to the school's peer culture and to students' perceptions of gender stereotyping in the classroom. To do this, this monograph advances Mindset × Context Theory.

A values-aligned intervention fosters growth mindset-supportive teaching and reduces inequality in educational outcomes.

Group-based educational disparities are smaller in classrooms where teachers express a belief that students can improve their abilities. However, a scalable method for motivating teachers to adopt such growth mindset-supportive teaching practices has remained elusive. In part, this is because teachers often already face overwhelming demands on their time and attention and have reason to be skeptical of the professional development advice they receive from researchers and other experts.

Utility-value intervention promotes persistence and diversity in STEM.

We tested the long-term effects of a utility-value intervention administered in a gateway chemistry course, with the goal of promoting persistence and diversity in STEM. In a randomized controlled trial (N = 2,505), students wrote three essays about course content and its personal relevance or three control essays. The intervention significantly improved STEM persistence overall (74% vs.

Efficiently exploring the causal role of contextual moderators in behavioral science.

Behavioral science interventions have the potential to address longstanding policy problems, but their effects are typically heterogeneous across contexts (e.g., teachers, schools, and geographic regions).

Peer-Modeled Mindsets: An Approach to Customizing Life Sciences Studying Interventions.

Mindset interventions, which shift students' beliefs about classroom experiences, have shown promise for promoting diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Psychologists have emphasized the importance of customizing these interventions to specific courses, but there is not yet a protocol for doing so. We developed a protocol for creating customized "peer-modeled" mindset interventions that elicit advice from former students in videotaped interviews.

Beliefs, affordances, and adolescent development: Lessons from a decade of growth mindset interventions.

Beliefs play a central role in human development. For instance, a growth mindset-a belief about the malleability of intelligence-can shape how adolescents interpret and respond to academic difficulties and how they subsequently navigate the educational system. But do usually-adaptive beliefs have the same effects for adolescents regardless of the contexts they are in? Answering this question can reveal new insights into classic developmental questions about continuity and change.

Inside the STEM pipeline: Changes in students' biomedical career plans across the college years.

Researchers often invoke the metaphor of a pipeline when studying participation in careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), focusing on the important issue of students who "leak" from the pipeline, but largely ignoring students who persist in STEM. Using interview, survey, and institutional data over 6 years, we examined the experiences of 921 students who persisted in biomedical fields through college graduation and planned to pursue biomedical careers. Despite remaining in the biomedical pipeline, almost half of these students changed their career plans, which was almost twice the number of students who abandoned biomedical career paths altogether.

College Students' Reasons for Leaving Biomedical Fields: Disenchantment with Biomedicine or Attraction to Other Fields?

This study examined whether students who left biomedical fields of study during college did so primarily because they became disenchanted with those fields or because they felt attracted to alternative fields of study. We identified 1193 students intending to pursue biomedical fields of study early in college, collected data about their beliefs and performance throughout college, and interviewed them near graduation about their future plans. Descriptively, we examined the topics students discussed as affecting their attrition decisions.

The Role of Utility Value in Promoting Interest Development.

An individual's initial interest in a topic may quickly fade, or it may become deeper and more enduring. One factor that may support an emerging interest is to discover utility value (or usefulness) in the topic. Instructional materials that emphasize the utility value of a topic can enhance learning and motivation, but whether these materials can foster interest development among individuals who show initial interest in a topic is uncertain.

Choose Your Own Intervention: Using Choice to Enhance the Effectiveness of a Utility-Value Intervention.

Utility-value interventions, in which students are asked to make connections between course material and their lives, are useful for improving students' academic outcomes in science courses. These interventions are thought to be successful in part because the intervention activities afford students autonomy while they complete them, but no research has explored directly whether interventions that include more support for autonomy are more effective. In this study, the degree of choice incorporated in a utility-value intervention was systematically varied in order to test this possibility.

Promoting Persistence in the Biological and Medical Sciences: An Expectancy-Value Approach to Intervention.

A wide range of occupations require science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills, yet almost half of students who intend to pursue a post-secondary STEM education abandon these plans before graduating from college. This attrition is especially pronounced among underrepresented groups (i.e.

The Benefits of Combining Value for the Self and Others in Utility-Value Interventions.

Utility-value interventions, in which students complete writing assignments about the personal usefulness of course material, show great promise for promoting interest and performance in introductory college science courses, as well as persistence in STEM fields. As researchers move toward scaling up this intervention, it's important to understand which features are key to its effectiveness. For example, prior studies have used different types of utility-value assignments (i.

Understanding Long-Term Effects of Motivation Interventions in a Changing World.

As intervention science develops, researchers are increasingly attending to the long-term effects of interventions in academic settings. Currently, however, there is no common taxonomy for understanding the complex processes through which interventions can produce long-lasting effects. The lack of a common framework results in a number of challenges that limit the ability of intervention scientists to effectively work toward their goal of preparing students to effectively navigate a changing and uncertain world.

Making Learning Personally Meaningful: A New Framework for Relevance Research.

Personal relevance goes by many names in the motivation literature, stemming from a number of theoretical frameworks. Currently these lines of research are being conducted in parallel with little synthesis across them, perhaps because there is no unifying definition of the relevance construct within which this research can be situated. In this paper we propose a new framework to synthesize existing research on relevance and provide a common platform for researchers to communicate and collaborate.

Improving Performance and Retention in Introductory Biology with a Utility-Value Intervention.

One way to encourage performance and persistence in STEM fields is to have students write about the utility value (UV) or personal relevance of course topics to their life. This intervention has been shown to increase engagement and performance in introductory courses. However, questions remain about the longevity of the effects and how best to implement the intervention in terms of dosage and timing.

Different Institutions and Different Values: Exploring First-Generation Student Fit at 2-Year Colleges.

First-generation (FG) college students (students for whom neither parent has a 4-year degree) face a number of challenges as they attempt to obtain a post-secondary degree. They are more likely to come from working-class backgrounds or poverty (Reardon, 2011) and attend lower quality high schools (Warburton et al., 2001) while not benefiting from the guidance of a parent who successfully navigated the path to higher education.

Probiotic Bifidobacterium species stimulate human SLC26A3 gene function and expression in intestinal epithelial cells.

SLC26A3, or downregulated in adenoma (DRA), plays a major role in mediating Cl(-) absorption in the mammalian intestine. Disturbances in DRA function and expression have been implicated in intestinal disorders such as congenital Cl(-) diarrhea and gut inflammation. We previously showed that an increase in DRA function and expression by Lactobacillus acidophilus and its culture supernatant (CS) might underlie antidiarrheal effects of this probiotic strain.