Designing Integrated Structural Support for Epistemology, Growth Mindset, and Sense of Belonging in Introductory Physics

This project aims to serve the national interest by establishing practices to improve student mindset and persistence in physics. This project plans to investigate new methods for designing introductory physics courses to develop productive student beliefs about their own learning. The target beliefs are correlated with students' learning, academic achievement, and well-being. This project hopes to advance the science of instructional design through the goal of producing clear design principles for developing these target beliefs. Design efforts will focus on how course curriculum and policies can tacitly communicate and reinforce productive beliefs and promote student engagement. Because introductory physics is an early core course in many undergraduate STEM majors, the improvements developed through this project can improve early undergraduate persistence in STEM and seed future success of STEM students. This project will iteratively design the course structures of a large-enrollment introductory physics course to promote positive development of three key aspects of students' beliefs about their own learning: physics epistemology, growth mindset, and sense of belonging. Though approaches for positively impacting these educationally relevant beliefs have been developed in other projects, prior approaches often consider one kind of belief in isolation, providing little insight into how these beliefs and their development may be related. To investigate and improve students' beliefs about their own learning, this project uses a design-based research approach. The project will iteratively develop instructional design principles centered on how these three beliefs can be coherently integrated with course activities and instructor messaging through three classroom practices: (i) valuing learning over time, (ii) talking about and resolving wrong ideas, and (iii) eliciting, sharing, and engaging with others' ideas. Design iterations will be informed by a mixed methods approach using student reflections, classroom observations, interviews, and survey data. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through its Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.