Appendix to “Does Studying CS Automatically Foster a Growth Mindset?”

Context

This page contains additional information about the paper:

Michael Lodi. 2019. Does Studying CS Automatically Foster a Growth Mindset?.
In Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE ’19), July 15–17, 2019, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3304221.3319750

In the paper, a study about Computer Science and Growth Mindset is described. Here is reported the English translation of the questionnaires used (that are in Italian).

Meta-comments are in italics/square brackets, not part of the text of the questionnaire.

Pre-post questionnaires

The pre and post questionnaires for CS and non-CS classes have a very similar structure. Differences are highlighted.
Question marked with * are reverse scored so that a low score always indicates a less desirable belief (e.g. fixed mindset), and a high score a more desirable belief (e.g. growth mindset).
Questions were presented in random order within each section.

General questions

  • Gender
  • Before this school year, you had already programmed?
  • [Shown only if answered ‘yes’ to the previous question] In which programming languages you had already programmed?
  • [Only in post-test for CS-oriented] With respect to the first term, your grades in CS related disciplines… (improved (+1) / remained the same (0) / worsened (-1)).

General beliefs

[These questions are based on (Dweck, 2003), an italian translation of the original (Dweck, 2000).]

Growth mindset

Rate from 1 (totally disagree) to 6 (totally agree).

  • * You have a certain amount of intelligence, and you can’t really do much to change it.
  • * Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much.
  • * You can learn new things, but you can’t really change your basic intelligence.

Confidence in one’s intelligence

Choose the most true between two sentences, then show how true is it for you, from 1 (sort of true for me) to 6 (very true for me).
[Scores were re-scaled from 12 (very true, high confidence) to 1 (sort of true, low confidence)]

  • I usually think I’m intelligent / I wonder if I’m intelligent
  • When I get new work in school, I’m usually sure I will be able to learn it. / When I get new work in school, I often think I may not be able to learn it
  • I’m not very confident about my intellectual ability / I feel pretty confident about my intellectual ability

Task choice goal measure

Rate from 1 (totally disagree) to 6 (totally agree).

  • * If I knew I wasn’t going to do well at a task, I probably wouldn’t do it even if I might learn a lot from it
  • * Although I hate to admit it, I sometimes would rather do well in a class of than learn a lot
  • It’s much more important for me to learn things in my classes than it is to get the best grades

Choose between Good grade (1) / Being challenged (6).

  • If I had to choose between getting good grades and being challenged in class, I would choose… (Good grade / Being challenged)

CS beliefs

[These scales were adapted from (Sun, 2015), a thesis about Mathematical Mindsets, changing the word “Math” with “Computer Science”.]

CS Mindset

Rate from 1 (totally disagree) to 6 (totally agree).

  • Anyone can be good at computer science if the word hard at it
  • * You have a certain amount of “computer science intelligence”, and you can’t really do much to change it.
  • * There are limits to how much people can improve their basic CS ability.
  • * Some students can never do well in computer science, even if they try hard.

Nature of CS

Rate from 1 (totally disagree) to 6 (totally agree).

  • * There is usually only one way to solve a CS problem
  • * CS involves mostly facts and procedures that have to be learned.
  • * People who really understand CS will have a solution quickly.
  • Mistakes are important when learning CS

Identification with CS

[For non-CS oriented classes, “is” and “will be” were changed in “would be”.]

  • I see myself as a “CS person”. (from 1 – totally disagree to 5 – totally agree)
  • I think CS is (easy (5) / hard (1)) for me.
  • I will be (bad (1) / good(5)) at CS.

CS Mastery orientation

Rate from 1 (not at all important) to 5 (extremely important).
[For non-CS oriented classes, second and fourth question was rephrased starting with “If you studied CS, …”.]

  • * In CS, how important is it to avoid making mistakes?
  • * How important is it that you to do better than other students in your CS class?
  • * In CS class, how important is it to get the right answer?
  • * How important is it that you do well in CS?

Open questions for the intervention class

In class INF1, halfway through the year, we performed a mindset intervention. At the end of the lesson, students were asked to reflect on struggle and answer the following open-ended questions.

Reflections after the lesson

Reflect on a situation when you struggled to learn something. It could be anything – learning a new math concept, or a new technique in soccer, or staring at the blank page during the writing of an essay. A situation where you failed at first but
through perservering, hard work, others help and using different strategies, you succeeded or you became better at the task at hand. How do you felt? How did you overcome that situation and what did you learn from it? [Adapted from (Khan Academy and PERTS, 2014)]

1. Letter to mates

Write a letter to a future student of your class about this struggle. In at least five sentences, tell this student your story and give him advice on what he should do next time he encounters an obstacle when learning something new. Feel free to be as creative as you would like, but try to write a useful letter. [Adapted from (Khan Academy and PERTS, 2014)]

2. What should a teacher do to stimulate a “growth mindset” in students?

Feel completely free to express what you think would be the best for yourself, and explain why.

3. Suggestions to mates about programming

From September 2017, or perhaps from before, you started to program. Maybe it was very easy for you, or on the contrary, you encountered many difficulties. Computer errors happen all the time, and even the most experienced programmers spend a lot of time debugging, that is, hunting for errors. Write in at least five sentences some tips that you would give to a classmate who has to start learning to program, recommending him concrete strategies to succeed and not to be discouraged in the face of difficulties related to learning programming. [Inspired by the intervention in (Simon et al., 2008)]

References (of the appendix)

Carol Dweck. 2000. Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Psychology Press.

Carol Dweck. 2003. Teorie del Sé. Intelligenza, motivazione, personalità e sviluppo. Erickson.

Khan Academy and PERTS. 2014. Growth Mindset Lesson Plan. Retrieved January 20, 2019 from https://cdn.kastatic.org/KA-share/Toolkit-photos/FINAL+Growth+Mindset+Lesson+Plan.pdf

Beth Simon, Brian Hanks, Laurie Murphy, Sue Fitzgerald, Renée McCauley, Lynda Thomas, and Carol Zander. 2008. Saying isn’t necessarily believing. Proceeding of the fourth international workshop on Computing education research – ICER ’08.

Katherine Liu Sun. 2015. There’s no limit: mathematics teaching for a growth mindset. Ph.D. Dissertation. Graduate School of Education, Stanford University. https://purl.stanford.edu/xf479cc2194