Origninally I was going to use this week to research whether or not the standards for science teaching place any emphasis on teaching about women in STEM, but when I was doing my NGSS research a few weeks ago it was evident that there is not any mention of this type of inclusion within the standards. This indicates that it is largely up to individual teachers and schools to learn about this and teach it in order to be more inclusive within the classroom. Since it is likely that teachers don’t get this training, this has negative implications for young girls’ encouragement to remain in STEM.
I researched growth mindset learning instead this week. Growth mindset is the belief that intelligence and abilities are developed with hard work instead of natural ability, I thought this would be good to research because of some of my previous readings which diuscussed that boys are often praised for their natural ability with science whereas girls often do not get the same praise.
The paper that I read did an experiment within a private school to see if a makerspace based classroom encouraged growth mindset in students. 3rd through 6th grade students at a private school participated in a program in which they identified an inquiry question of their own interest and then worked to find an answer in whatever way they felt fit. At the end they gave a presentation. The results showed that younger students had a higher growth mindset than the older ones by the end of the program. Girls had a higher growth mindset than boys. The researchers did not find a correlation between self efficacy and growth mindset, but they did find a correlation between growth mindset and creative mindset.
I believe that there are some important results from this experiment, but it is also important to note that the experiment took place at a predominately white and wealthy private school in which the students began the experiment with a relatively high growth mindset. The results that showed a correlation between creative mindset and growth mindset are very important and something to keep in mind as I’m creating my lessons because I want my students to feel creative and confident in their science abilities regardless of how good at science they see themselves. I would like to see a similar experiment to the one described in a lower income school. I predict that this experiment might show more of a correlation between growth mindset and self efficacy based on some of my previous readings and their emphasis on feeling confidence in ability to do science in order to grow more within science.
Full article: Growth mindset development in design-based makerspace: A longitudinal study. (n.d.). Retrieved October 4, 2021, from https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy048.nclive.org/doi/full/10.1080/00220671.2021.1872473
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