Exploring Mindset's Applicability to Students' Experiences with Challenge in Transformed College Physics Courses

TL;DR

This study investigates how students' responses to challenges in college physics relate to mindset theories, developing a new coding scheme to analyze interview data and revealing differences from traditional mindset literature.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel coding scheme for analyzing student responses to physics challenges and explores the applicability of mindset concepts in this context.

Findings

Student responses to physics challenges sometimes resemble mindset characterizations.

College physics challenges often differ from those in traditional mindset studies.

Mindset beliefs are not always the main factor influencing student responses in physics.

Abstract

The mindset literature is a longstanding area of psychological research focused on beliefs about intelligence, response to challenge, and goals for learning (Dweck, 2000). However, the mindset literature's applicability to the context of college physics has not been widely studied. In this paper we narrow our focus toward students' descriptions of their responses to challenge in college physics. We ask the research questions, "can we see responses to challenge in college physics that resemble that of the mindset literature?" and "how do students express evidence of challenge and to what extent is such evidence reflective of challenges found in the mindset literature?" To answer these questions, we developed a novel coding scheme for interview dialogue around college physics challenge and students' responses to it. In this paper we present the development process of our coding scheme. We find that it is possible to see student descriptions of challenge that resemble the mindset literature's characterizations. However, college physics challenges are frequently different than those studied in the mindset literature. We show that, in the landscape of college physics challenges, mindset beliefs cannot always be considered to be the dominant factor in how students respond to challenge. Broadly, our coding scheme helps the field move beyond broad Likert-scale survey measures of students' mindset beliefs.