Enhancing Growth Mindset Academic Experiences to Support Graduation of Undergraduate Students in Computing

This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at Rochester Institute of Technology. Over its five-year duration, this project will fund two-year scholarships to 30 unique first-year, full-time students.

This funding will support the students as they pursue Bachelor of Science degrees in Software Engineering, Computing Security, Computing and Information Technologies, Web and Mobile Computing, or Human Centered Computing. This project aims to improve Scholars' retention and graduation rates by fostering a growth mindset. People with growth mindsets think that their abilities are not talents that they are born with, but instead can be enhanced through persistence and hard work.

Faculty will gather as a learning community to understand, examine, develop, and apply evidence-based growth-mindset curricular enhancements. They will integrate these growth-mindset activities into programming and career preparation courses. Each Scholar will be paired with a faculty mentor and participate in an online mentoring community.

In addition, Scholars will engage as a cohort in a semester seminar focusing on metacognitive approaches to fostering a growth mindset. This project is significant in that it will broaden the mindset approach beyond a single classroom intervention to a more comprehensive approach that addresses students’ success as they prepare for graduation and entry to the workforce.

It also seeks to advance the computing education knowledgebase around integrating a growth mindset approach in post-secondary academic and career instruction.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. Using implicit theories of intelligence as a framework for the design and evaluation, this project aims to promote student success by infusing a growth mindset throughout students’ academic and career preparation experiences.

Building on research suggesting that mindset can be influenced to promote positive learning experiences, improved academic performance, and reduced vulnerability to stereotype threat, this project will adopt a holistic growth mindset approach for computing students. Metacognitive instruction around a growth mindset will also be integrated into student mentoring with the aim of promoting student success.

Two goals guide the project: (1) increase the completion rate of academically talented, low-income Scholars in earning Bachelor of Science computing degrees at Rochester Institute of Technology; and (2) advance the knowledgebase in computing education mindset theory. Research findings will be disseminated through conferences and publications in computing education and learning sciences, as well as to academic leaders across the institution to promote extension of the successful approaches to other STEM academic domains.

This project is funded by NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.

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.