Prevalence of a growth mindset among introductory astronomy students

While many previous studies have indicated that encouraging a growth mindset can improve student learning outcomes, this conclusion’s applicability to college-level astronomy classrooms remains poorly understood owing to the variation in students’ overall and domain-specific learning attitudes. To address this, we surveyed undergraduate students in an introductory astronomy class about their attitudes towards learning astronomy over the course of five semesters. Overall, students felt an affinity for astronomy, felt moderately competent, perceived astronomy to be intermediate in terms of difficulty, and agreed strongly with standard statements reflecting a “growth mindset,” i.e., the belief that intelligence is malleable rather than fixed from birth. Their responses were stable over the course of the semester and did not appear to depend strongly on student demographics. The unexpected start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated shift to all-virtual learning correlated with a drop in their affinity for astronomy, a small decrease in their perceived competence, and an increase in the perceived difficulty of the topic. Their overall learning mindset showed negligible change during this time, emphasizing the stability of their belief in a growth mindset as compared to other measured learning attitudes. However, more nuanced questions about their behaviors and interpretations in the classroom, about how they felt “in the moment,” and about what factors were most important for their success in the class revealed significantly lower alignment with a growth mindset. This suggests that while introductory astronomy students may believe that they have a growth mindset, this mindset is not necessarily reflected in their self-reported classroom behaviors or measured responses to actual learning challenges.

Figure 1

Mean presurvey (circles, dashed lines) and postsurvey (squares, solid lines) scores versus semester. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean. Background shading indicates the teaching modality for each semester, whether in-person (white), hybrid (light gray), or fully online (dark gray). In the top four panels, positive question (blue lines) and negative question (red lines) scores are shown, where applicable. In the bottom four panels, results from positive (thick green lines) and negative (thick orange lines) alternative mindset questions are compared with the standard mindset belief questions (blue and red thin lines).

Figure 2

Mean presurvey (circles, dashed lines) and postsurvey (squares, solid lines) scores versus semester for mindset beliefs questions. All mindset belief questions are shown in the top panel, as in Fig. 1, while the lower two panels show the results for general mindset belief questions (middle panel) versus astronomy-specific mindset belief questions (bottom panel), as discussed in the text. Positive question (blue) and negative question (red) scores are shown. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean. Shading indicates the teaching modality for each semester, whether in-person (white), hybrid (light gray), or fully online (dark gray).