Teaching.IU

Context

Research has repeatedly shown that first generation college students and under-represented students fail to succeed in college because they do not embrace the growth mindset (Yeager and Dweck, 2012).  A growth mindset enables students to move toward the “yes” of three important questions: Can I do it? Do I belong? And is it worth it (Yeager, Walton, and Cohen, 2013).  These three questions provide an ecosystem with the absence of any one affirmative thereby negatively affects a positive response to the other two questions. If students do not believe they “can do it,” they will never put in the effort to achieve success. 

 In Carol Dweck’s landmark work, Mindset (2006), she found that students’ mindsets—how they perceive their abilities—played a key role in their motivation and achievement. If students believed their intelligence could be developed (a growth mindset), they outperformed those who believed their intelligence was fixed (a fixed mindset). And when students learned they could “grow their brains” and increase their intellectual abilities, they did better. 

To teach growth mindset, I employed research based in collaborative gaming that directed my endeavors to develop a growth mindset game. I created the growth mindset game for our 10 sections of EDUC-U100 that serves our “conditionally admitted” students who enter college full of stories that suggest they cannot succeed. The game has assisted more than 500 students. 

Collaborative gaming as a way of learning and reviewing has become an increasingly popular way to engage students (Swanson, 2014). The Growth Mindset game has the potential, through collaborative gaming opportunities, to build a learning community and motivate students (Garris, Ahlers, & Driskell, 2002). In games, mistakes become offloaded to the activity of play; therefore, students focus on the larger goals of the game as a way to productively frame mistakes rather than associating them with failure (Gee, 2003). 

The Growth Mindset game connects to Kuh’s (2008) high impact practices because it is a problem-based, collaborative, game-based learning approach designed to improve undergraduates’ resiliency, persistence, and adaptability to change while building a community of learners. 

There are two broad goals of the Growth Mindset game. Our first goal is for students to develop a deeper, enduring understanding of the principles of growth mindset and how to apply these concepts to their academic and personal growth. Our second goal is to improve students’ argumentation skills and foster their development of well-reasoned, supported arguments.  

Step-by-Step Implementation

1. Present Growth Mindset PowerPoint to class. 
2. Carefully review the term sheet on Growth/Fixed Mindset before and while playing the game. 
3. Play a few practice games so students begin to understand how the game is played. 
4. Play the game (you decide how many scenarios you want to include in a game). 
5. Ask students to create a Growth Mindset Goal. The goal should be for their toughest class and include three strategies for reaching that goal. 
6. Check in with students on their progress every week to two or three weeks. 

Effectiveness

Feedback from student: “Even though the game is tough and really makes me think about Growth Mindset, I now feel like I get it. Never realized that I had a fixed mindset about school and so many other things.”