Global Mindset Initiative Paper 3: Measuring Growth Mindset Classroom Cultures

Abstract

The next step in promoting growth mindsets in youth is to develop supporting classroom cultures in which students both experience a high-quality student intervention and have teachers who received a growth mindset training program. Developing high-quality measures is an important step in the development and testing process of such an intervention and realizing the full promise of growth mindset research. High-quality measures provide insight into questions such as, for whom an intervention is effective and why it is effective, providing important lessons that can be used to better help teachers create a growth mindset classroom culture more reliably and across contexts. This paper introduces a framework and research agenda for developing valid, scalable measures of growth-mindset culture, and describes the challenges researchers need to overcome to create this set of high-quality measures.

Keywords: measurement, growth mindset, classroom culture, student perceptions, teacher beliefs, teacher practices