Did growth mind set messages make a difference?


Sarah Richards Sarah Richards has worked in educaon for over 30 years, mainly in Lan America and the UK. At present she teaches GCSE maths at Abingdon and Witney Further Educaon College, Oxfordshire. She also works as a Professional Development Lead with the Educaon and Training Foundaon Maths Pipeline programme.


In recent years the naonal pass rate for students retaking GCSE maths at further educaon colleges has been just over 20%. It is therefore not surprising that students are pessimisc about their chances of success when they embark on the compulsory retake course in September. It is very likely that this pessimism, which generally includes the belief of being ‘rubbish at maths’, impedes learning.


At Abingdon and Witney college in 2014/15 a colleague and I tried systemacally to challenge unhelpful beliefs about learning maths by using ‘growth mind set messages’ to see if this would result in a change in atudes and aainment. We carried out a praconer led acon research project (funded by the ETF and emCETT) and based our intervenon on material and ideas we got from the Stanford University MOOC ‘How to Learn Maths for Students’. The MOOC is based Dweck’s ‘growth mind set’ approach and adapted for maths by Jo Boaler and team (Boaler, 2014). The basic messages were that the brain is plasc and it is not ‘talent’ that makes the difference but: perseverance; making mistakes; struggle; seeking to understand the ‘big’ ideas; discussion and working with others. Judging by the feedback this approach had a posive impact on the majority of the students. Our report is tled: Resing GCSE Maths; do growth mind set messages make a difference?


There is also a video made by the students: GCSE Student Interviews:


My colleague was a student teacher and the pressures of study, teaching and a new baby meant that he didn’t implement all the ideas although he was a great help in discussing the themes. So the final analysis was only done on my 19 students. At the beginning of the year 75% of students said they didn’t like maths lessons. At the end of the academic year about 70% of the students reported liking maths lessons; the remaining 30% disliked them less (fig 1). However they did no beer in the exam than in previous years when there hadn’t been a focus on growth mind set messages (42% of the students passed; 8/19). They all had had a D to begin with; six had made no appreciable mathemacal progress and three, who got an E, appeared to have gone backwards! I was disappointed. However, it is now a year on. Although I’m not teaching any of them I see the eight who are sll at college around the campus. In September 2015 four of these students said that they were determined to pass this year. One had been parcularly negave and grumpy at the beginning of the previous year. It is now June. Because of the progress she has made one has been nominated as college maths student of the year and another one passed the November retake. Eight have sat the June 2016 exams; the results won’t be known unl August but in the Easter mocks four either passed or did well enough to be predicted a C, one didn’t take the exam and three have been a predicted a D. It is perhaps not fair to judge the impact of the messages over just one year. The students come with substanal negave feelings about maths and beliefs about their capacity and it takes me to remedy this.


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