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A blend of family attitudes, cultural ideas, and frustration often lead students to believe that math ability is a fixed trait like eye color, teachers say. They believe they are either born with the skills necessary to succeed in math class or they're not.
Those pervasive ideas and the way math has traditionally been taught can make it exceptionally difficult for math teachers to nurture growth mindsets in their students, they say.
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| Photo: Philip Uri Treisman |
"It has sort of cultural baggage with it that is not helpful to the field," he said.
The concept of growth mindsets has gained a foothold in many schools, where teachers emphasize that the brain can grow and change and that students don't enter school with a set of unchangeable strengths and weaknesses. In general, that means praising effort over personal traits and encouraging students to learn from mistakes by developing new strategies to approach problems.
As more schools buy into the research that shows that student mindsets and persistence are linked to academic success, researchers are working to develop more specific strategies for nurturing positive learning attitudes in areas like mathematics.
The key, they say, is changing both the student's ideas about learning and the way teachers approach math content.
The Dana Center's Academic Youth Development program, for example, blends mindsets research with math concepts through both professional development for teachers and summer programs for students as they prepare to enter 9th grade, which is often the year students take Algebra 1. Researchers are studying the effects of the program, which is being used in 1,250 middle and high schools around the country.
'My Favorite No'
Some teachers are also making efforts on their own to learn about the mindset concept. Stanford University's Project for Education Research That Scales, or PERTS, released a series of online courses about mindsets for parents and teachers last month. It included just one subject-specific course: a series of videos, exercises, and sample lesson plans tailored for math teachers.
That course includes guidance on how to "normalize failure" by encouraging students to ask questions that they may be afraid to ask and to share incorrect answers with their peers.
"Sometimes it's important to simply tell students that you love mistakes because that's how students learn," one sample discussion plan says. "Start the class with a lesson on why you like mistakes and what students can learn from them."
Classroom teachers say many of their students approach math with the expectation that they have failed if they can't quickly solve a problem using a prescribed algorithm.
With a mindset approach, teachers help students focus on learning from that failure and trying the problem from a different angle so that students can understand the underlying concepts.
The Stanford course includes a video of a teacher doing a daily exercise called "my favorite no." At the beginning of class, she has every student solve a problem on an index card, sorting the resulting answers into a pile of correct and incorrect answers. She then copies an incorrect answer onto the board and asks students to identify all of the correct elements before honing in on what part of their classmate's solution led them to an incorrect answer.
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Source: Education Week
