Makerspaces and Growth Mindset: Reading Review C

My reading review looked at whether or not makerspaces could foster growth mindset development.   I knew little about makerspaces until last week. I narrowed my topic down from previous weeks to reflect my growing interest in makerspaces and my continued interest in becoming better at creating a growth mindset environment for my students.  Up to now, I have only used ready to go growth mindset resources and read about growth mindset on teacher blogs. This week I began looking deeper into what growth mindset was, how to foster growth mindset in children and then I looked at makerspaces and how they could enhance growth mindset.

What Is Growth Mindset?

I began with looking for more information on growth mindset.  I found two helpful videos.

RSA (2013, July 8) RSA Replay - How to Help Every Child Fulfil Their Potential. [Video].  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyVZ0KKJuTg

Carol Dweck coined the phrase Growth Mindset.  Her work centres around the idea that our brains are malleable and that intelligence is not fixed.  Through effort, dedication, learning and mentorship students can increase their intelligence.  Dweck talks about how using the word 'yet' when a student is confronted with a challenge reinforces the idea that students are on a learning continuum.  

 Dweck, C. (2014, November) The Power of Believing That You Can Improve. [Video]. https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve?language=en#t-608685%20

Dweck encourages some changes in adult behaviour to help children develop a growth mindset.  Dweck recommends: 1) Praise the process (effort, strategies, perseverance, focus, improvement) rather than intelligence or achievement 2) Use the word 'yet' with children as doing so improves their confidence.  3) Change student mindsets (teach about what brains do when you're challenged). Dweck also points out how classrooms 'steeped' in growth mindset can be an equalizer of students especially for those who are labelled as disadvantaged or special needs.

How Can Students' Mindset Be Enhanced?

According to Dweck (2014) there are three ways we can help students develop growth mindset (1. Praise process, 2. Use the word "yet" 3. Teach about what your brain does when challenged).  I sought out some articles to support these ideas.

1.  Change Student Mindset: Interventions

Yeager, D.S., Hanselman, P., Walton, G.M. et al. (2019). A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement. Nature 573, 364–369. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1466-y

A group of high school students were given a short, one-hour, online growth mindset intervention.  The group of students who received the intervention demonstrated higher levels of achievement in their Math course and were more likely to pursue harder math courses the next year.  Furthermore, schools that had many resources and students who were supported in using their enhanced growth mindset by peers, showed greater gains than students from schools that had fewer resources and less supportive peers.  The authors point out how their study sets the stage for further research into how to enhance both growth mindset intervention as well as the school environment. 

The intervention in this study was done online and not delivered by teachers.  I wonder if teachers could deliver the intervention to students with the same or better results.  This may be an area for future research.

2. Praise the Process

Eleanor O'Rourke, Erin Peach, Carol S. Dweck, and Zoran Popovic. (2016). Brain Points: A Deeper Look at a Growth Mindset Incentive Structure for an Educational Game. In Proceedings of the Third (2016) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 41–50. https://doi.org/10.1145/2876034.2876040

Researchers developed a video game that rewarded process rather than achievement.  Players were given points when they demonstrated growth mindset behaviours such as effort, trying different strategies and making progress.  This math game rewarded process.  Researchers found that showing student progress in  the form of a chart boosted student motivation to continue playing.  Results showed that students who were rewarded for process demonstrated increased effort, they used more strategies, more engagement (students played the game longer than the control group) and students demonstrated more perseverance when they faced a challenge.

3.  Encourage "Yet'

Dweck (2014) recommends using the word 'yet' with students to bolster confidence.  I interpreted her idea as a suggestion that modelling growth mindset language and behaviours in our daily interactions with students would help foster growth mindset.  Using the word 'yet' when faced with a challenging problem can help students reform their thoughts: "I can't do ___, yet".  This can change the idea of making a mistake from a thing to be avoided to just being part of the learning process.  

Hamilton, Connie. “Kick the IDK Bucket: How to Rid Your Classroom of ‘I Don't Know.’” Cult of Pedagogy, 26 May 2020, www.cultofpedagogy.com/idk/

In this article/podcast the author argues that adding 'yet' isn't enough when faced with a difficult challenge.    Students need a plan to move forward if learning is to occur.  Teaching students strategies to move forward with their learning is necessary.

 Terada, Youki (2020, November 19). The Mistake Imperative—Why We Must Get Over Our Fear of Student Error. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/mistake-imperative-why-we-must-get-over-our-fear-student-error

This article outlines 5 ways teachers can create a mistake friendly classroom. These ideas can help students normalize making mistakes through teacher modelling and changes in the classroom. I believe the suggestions can be applied to makerspaces as well.

1.  Acknowledge that the fear of making mistakes is real by identifying and confronting destructive thinking replace "I'm stupid" with "I'm learning".
2.  Work in the Zone of Proximal Thinking by providing students with challenging, open ended problems
3.  Tap into Passion since when students are into the subject they are more likely to tolerate mistakes.
4.   Encourage Rough Draft Thinking, which gives permission to ask questions and revise without having to worry they are wrong
5.  Grade Fewer things which results in lower stress classroom environments, where students can take risks.

Can Makerspaces Support the Development of Growth Mindset?

I found only one article that directly addressed the idea that makerspaces can influence growth mindset development. Out of the 3 ways Dweck (2014) outlined to help children develop growth mindset, the below article only studied that of intervention.

1.  Intervention: 

Vanessa W. Vongkulluksn, Ananya M. Matewos & Gale M. Sinatra (2021) Growth mindset development in design-based makerspace: a longitudinal study, The Journal of Educational Research, DOI: 10.1080/00220671.2021.1872473. 

Design based makerspaces are makerspaces structured around the design process.   Researchers compared the stages of design with growth mindset intervention strategies and found many similarities: 1) Emphasis on process 2) Value effort 3) Feedback focused on process goals.   Researchers found that students who participated in the design based makerspace showed an increase in growth mindset development.  One of the unintentional findings was that growth mindset development may not occur immediately after being part of a design based makerspace.  There can be a time lag.    This study showed that using proven intervention strategies within a designed based makerspace can enhance growth mindset in students.

What I noticed with this study was that there was no direct instruction about how the brain works or on growth mindset, which is one of the ways Dweck (2014) recommends to increase growth mindset in children. This may be something to consider for future research.

2. Praise the Process and 3. Encourage "Yet"

I was not able to find anything in the literature that referred to specific strategies regarding praise or growth mindset behaviours to model in the makerspace.  Of course, this is up to the teacher and teachers vary in their knowledge, application and beliefs surrounding growth mindset. It would be hard to quantify this.  However,  I do think it would be interesting to see if growth mindset strategies taught intentionally during makerspace experiences could prove beneficial in developing growth mindset. I would be interested in seeing if an  online intervention like that done by Yaeger (et al., 2019) combined with students invovlement in a  makerspace could result in further enhancing students growth mindset.

Overall, while there is some evidence to support the idea that makerspaces foster growth mindset, there is not much.  A lot can be inferred from existing studies but little has been proven.  The one study that I did find is relatively new and hasn't been replicated or peer reviewed from what I could find.  There are an abundance of paths for researchers to follow in this area.