During a learning key workshop on confidence [in Learning & Development course], I learned how a growth mindset is extremely important for students to develop. A growth mindset is one where the individual believes that they are able to grow and improve as long as they put in the effort. It is very essential for students to have this mindset, as they need to build resilience through their studies. If a student has a fixed mindset, receiving a 'bad' grade or facing a challenging assessment or assignment would set them back. They would believe they are not good enough, not smart and not able to complete the task, resulting in them giving up before even trying. On the other hand, with a growth mindset, the student would face these challenges with optimism and excitement, and a bad grade does not set them back as they view it as an opportunity to improve and try again.
As a future teacher, I have learned about how important it is to praise the students effort and process instead of their resulting grade. By only praising the students good grades, you are building their competence but not their confidence. They will view themselves as worthy only when they receive the high grade, and thus this will lead to a fixed mindset if they receive a grade that is below those that receive praise. If efforts and processes are praised instead, the student will develop confidence in their work and will learn strategies to tackle difficult tasks. This confidence will eventually lead to resilience, allowing students to 'bounce back' after doing not so well on an assessment. This is essential to the growth mindset and can be fostered in students with the help of their teachers noticing their efforts on each task.
Learning about this topic in class made me reflect on my own experiences as a student. I have always gotten very good grades and would be told how smart I am. I developed into a student who would be sad, anxious and extremely hard on myself if I received a grade under a 90, as I believed that it was not good enough. I hope to change that for my students as it was a very unhealthy mindset to have, and now I know to praise the efforts of students rather than their smarts. With this in mind, I thought back to my first year physics class in university. The course was delivered online since we were just getting past the Covid lockdown. Because of this, the midterms and exams were online, but were not proctored. In order to maintain academic integrity, they would have you input your final numerical answer into the test instead of multiple choice or showing your work. Since it was set up this way, it did not matter if you did the process correct and put the effort in to solving the question, you would simply either get the 1 mark for the correct answer or 0 marks if the number you input was wrong. This was extremely difficult for me, as I would go through the practice questions and get them right, but when it came to the tests I believed that I was solving the question correctly, but would get the wrong final number. I put so much effort into learning the physics and understanding it but then was very discouraged when I would get my grade back and not receive any marks for doing it the correct way or any feedback on where I went wrong since we could not show our work. I enjoyed learning the content at the beginning of the course, but after those tests I started to dislike the course and thus physics in general. This is an example of a teacher not praising the effort and only praising the outcome/result. It is very discouraging and led me to have a fixed mindset of never being good at physics.
Courtesy of KaylaM@OTU
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