Monitoring the progress of the research study

Periodic reflections about the research study

Oct 18, 2018

Starting point

At the beginning of the semester, my key research question was: what are the design opportunities for cultivating students’ growth mindsets?

Steps I took and reflections

Literature Review
Status: Reviewed 8 books and 4 articles.
Reflection: Since the meaning of growth mindset was vague to me, I started off reading about books and publications that directly address the growth mindset. Soon I realized that the kinds of literature I was reviewing weren’t broad enough. I adjusted my approach and started to read books from different categories such as learning theory and cognitive science. The change was really helpful as I started to take bits and bolts from different categories and see connections. I also learned that I should filter out the books that are not relevant to my research questions and target audience. Although this is still something I need to work on, I feel that I am better at selecting materials to read now. Another challenge I had was that I couldn’t read as many materials as I planned to. My advisor suggested me to read only the first few paragraphs of each chapter to decide whether it is helpful. If not, I should drop it immediately and move on. I found this method to be efficient. Sometimes I took sketchnotes to help myself process and retain the key learnings from a book. Although the practice can be time-consuming sometimes, when I see the sketches I drew, I immediately recall the key information. For the second half of semester, I am going to modify my reading list so that the books are more pertinent to my narrowed scope.

Artifact Review
Status: Reviewed 6 artifacts, 2 in progress
Reflection: Many of the artifacts I reviewed so far teach growth-mindset directly by telling students how brain works and by explaining why intelligence can grow in a scientific way. However, I learned that this approach works really well for students from low-income families but not so much for students who come from affluent families. Given that the target audience of my research is not specified to students from low-income families, I will shift my focus to review methods/tools that help students identify their problems, find alternative solutions and increase the likelihood of risk taking as a way to foster growth-mindset. For the second half of my semester, I will be reviewing more artifacts that are used together with specific subjects such as maths or writing.

IRB
Status: First IRB proposal approved
Reflection: One lesson I learned through writing the proposal for IRB was that before planning any exercise or interview questions, I should be clear about what I wanted to find out through IRB proposal and why.

Interview
Status: Interviewed 3 instructors and 4 students
Reflection: After 1–2 runs of interviews, I realized that some questions were redundant. At the same time, I discovered that some key questions were missing. For example, I didn’t include a question to identify the causes of the educational setbacks mentioned by students. After discovering the issues, I slightly modified the questions to make them more useful. What I found most effective was the exercise for students to rank the factors that motivate them. This exercise allows me to quantify each factor’s perceived importance, and gain a deeper understanding of how students think of each one. Talking to instructors also refined my understanding of the problem space. I am also planning to speak with instructors who specialize in learning sciences and educational tools development. I intend to use those expert interviews to validate my assumptions, get recommendations for literature/artifacts, and identify design opportunities.

Seminar Project
Status: Submitted a project plan to Dan Lockton, got feedback from peers and spoke with Dan. Found a few literature resources.
Reflection: For my seminar project, I am researching into/of design. As designers, we often go through the process of prototyping, testing and iterating. We document our findings, reflect, and let them guide our next iteration. We seem to treat setbacks and failures as essential parts of the process. This perspective might have helped us become more resilient in the face of adversities. It makes me hypothesize whether this process of making prototypes can be adopted in non-design disciplines? Will that help non-design students better cope with challenges and treat them as opportunities to grow? In order to validate my assumption, I will compare and contrast design with another selected discipline. My goal is to find similarities and patterns.

Summary

Reading books and articles from variety of categories helps me unravel the abstract concept of fostering growth mindset. I came to realize that there are many factors that go into developing a growth mindset. I found myself keep coming back to metacognitive skills. Many literature and artifacts pointed me to this direction. I also believe that changes start with looking back at the past and question what went right and wrong. At the same time, I understand that it is not easy for students, especially underclassmen to excel at the metacognitive skills. External factors need to be leveraged. During my interviews with students, many of them mentioned study group as one of the most effective strategies that helps them persevere through the educational setbacks.

For the next steps, I want to investigate whether the prototyping process can be applied to other disciplines to normalize mistakes, encourage explorations and visualize growth. Some of the questions I still need to find out include:

• Does the intervention require an individual or collaborative effort?
• Which subject should I start with?
• What are the values for using prototyping as a method in other disciplines? Some of my current assumptions include:
  1) Encourage exploration 2) Alleviate the anxiety of getting things right in one shot 3) Break the daunting task into smaller, achievable parts 4) Help students visualize what they know in order to diagnose what they don’t 5) Encourage group collaboration to build upon each other’s understanding 6) Document progress and encourage reflection