Three teaching things: week of April 18
This week: mindsets and racialized students' achievement gaps; 7 exam questions that build habits of mind; and a tool for quick and secure file sharing.
Issue #43
1. The paper
STEM faculty who believe ability is fixed have larger racial achievement gaps and inspire less student motivation in their classes
Today, students in our Colleges and Universities come from a wider diversity of backgrounds than ever before. And—at least at the level of institutions—we’re committed to making campuses more inclusive for these students, in part to ensure their success. This paper adds to that literature from the STEM disciplines, by looking at faculty members’ self-reported perceptions of undergraduate student mindsets (from Dweck’s work on mindsets) and racialized students’ success in undergrad classes.
And the findings are sobering: the “…racial achievement gap was nearly twice as large in courses taught by college professors who endorsed fixed (versus growth) mindset beliefs about students’ ability” (p. 2), suggesting that “…that faculty mindset beliefs predict students’ experiences in their STEM courses and the magnitude of the racial achievement gaps in these courses” (p. 4). Also interesting: the findings that 1) there was no difference in mindset belief when controlling for faculty members’ ethnicity or sex, and 2) the fixed mindset belief was “endorsed equally” (p. 2) across the 13 disciplines in the sample.
Which points to one conclusion from the paper: “…professors’ mindset beliefs may be a potential lever to creating identity-safe…learning environments where all students, regardless of race/ethnicity, feel that they are valued and encouraged to reach their full potential” (p. 5).
Canning, E. A., Muenks, K., Green, D. J., & Murphy, M. C. (2019). STEM faculty who believe ability is fixed have larger racial achievement gaps and inspire less student motivation in their classes. Science Advances, 5(2), eaau4734. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau4734
2. The resource
7 Exam Questions for a Pandemic (or any other time)
This blog post is a year old, authored as academics considered how assessment would need to shift to meet the realities of un-proctored assessments. Written by Dr. Francis Su (the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College, USA), it hasn’t lost any relevance, and aligns well with Su’s other work on articulating how the study of mathematics and being human are deeply intertwined.
Su writes: “I speak often about how mathematical teaching often overemphasizes teaching specific facts or procedures, while underemphasizing all that goes into building mathematical explorers who have the habits of mind and confidence to solve problems they've never seen before.”
If, and as, you consider those habits of mind (maybe what you’d also call metacognition) that you hope to build in learners, consider the seven questions (and the larger categories they represent—e.g., persistence, curiosity, strategization) and how they could be adapted to your discipline and course context.
3. The tool
Wormhole
“Simple, private file sharing” with end-to-end encryption, and instant file streaming. If you use Dropbox or WeTransfer to share files, this tool appears to offer security and privacy improvements in comparison with other applications.
Three Teaching Things is a weekly newsletter compiled by Gavan Watson, which shares three different teaching and learning resources (papers, resources or tools) worth your attention.
Thanks for reading!