Teacher beliefs : effects of a teacher based mindset intervention on math student motivation and achievement

Social psychological interventions (SPI) have been found to be robustly effective on increasing student achievement, and are especially effective on students who face psychological threat due to their underrepresented identity (Yeager & Walton, 2011, Cohen & Sherman, 2014). Growth mindset interventions, however, have been focused solely on students and have ignored the role of teachers. Additionally, past literature has not addressed whether mindset interventions that are focused on teachers have positive effects on both teachers and students. This is a problem, of course, because teacher beliefs are strongly associated with students’ behavior and achievement (Handal, 2003) and may influence the effects of growth mindset interventions on student motivation. This dissertation examined these issues in nine schools using a pre-post experimental design to test whether a teacher-based growth mindset online intervention influenced both the beliefs and practices of 25 secondary math teachers and the motivation of their 1,653 students. Contrary to the hypothesis, results showed that intervention had no measurable effects on teacher beliefs and practices but did influence students’ interest and mastery orientation in math. In addition, teachers’ growth mindset beliefs and classroom practices moderated student mastery orientation. These findings have the potential to increase knowledge concerning the use of growth mindset interventions for teachers, which may be an effective and efficient method for enhancing teacher beliefs and practices to foster adaptable learning environments in math classrooms.