Measuring Chemistry-Specific Mindset Beliefs of Students in Undergraduate Chemistry Courses

College students’ beliefs about intelligence and learning can impact their academic achievement and success. Students with fixed mindset beliefs view their intelligence as unchangeable, while students with growth mindset believe they can improve their intelligence with time and effort. Growth mindset beliefs are associated with better academic performance and achievement in STEM, including for students from groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields.

However, there is limited understanding of the role of domain-specific mindset beliefs in students’ success in introductory college chemistry courses, which is pivotal for retaining students in many STEM majors. With support from NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program, this project seeks to serve the national interest by developing a valid and reliable measure of chemistry-specific mindset beliefs.

In addition, the project team will investigate the relationships between these mindset beliefs and student outcomes in general chemistry and organic chemistry courses. Being able to measure chemistry-specific mindset beliefs will assist researchers and instructors in better understanding what interventions are effective for supporting students’ success in STEM.

A team of researchers at Georgia State University and Portland State University will investigate students’ implicit beliefs about chemistry intelligence and develop a measure of these beliefs. Theories of implicit beliefs about intelligence posit that students with fixed mindset beliefs tend to avoid challenging situations while students with growth mindset are more likely to choose challenging tasks and engage in behaviors that lead to success.

However, the role student mindset beliefs play in chemistry courses is not well studied. To this end, three specific objectives will guide this project. First is to characterize the chemistry-specific mindset beliefs of students in general and organic chemistry courses.

Second is to develop and psychometrically evaluate an appropriate measure of chemistry mindset beliefs for undergraduate students. And third is to understand the relations between chemistry mindset and various affective and cognitive outcomes for chemistry courses. To accomplish these objectives, the project team will conduct qualitative interviews with students to understand their implicit beliefs about intelligence as it relates to chemistry.

The team will also conduct cognitive interviews to assess the interpretation and readability of newly-designed items to measure chemistry-specific mindsets. In addition, the data generated by this project will be subjected to psychometric analyses to assess validity and reliability. The project team will collect data from Georgia State University, a large minority-serving institution, as well as from Georgia Gwinnett College, Georgia Southern University, and Spelman College.

This will provide substantial input from students from diverse and underrepresented groups in STEM, which is expected to enhance the ability of this project to widely inform STEM education nationally. An advisory board of experts external to the project will provide feedback on the research findings and present recommendations for broader impacts. The project team will widely disseminate the results in discipline-specific and STEM-wide education journals, and will also seek opportunities to present webinars and workshops through the American Chemical Society Chemistry Education Research Committee and the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education.

Moreover, the final mindset measure will be made publicly available through the Chemistry Instrument Review and Assessment Library (CHIRAL) portal. The development of this chemistry-specific mindset measure will provide the chemistry education community with a theoretically grounded measure to advance the understanding of domain-specific mindset beliefs and provide an appropriate measure to assess the impact of chemistry-specific mindset interventions.

This work will also provide a model for developing and measuring domain-specific mindset beliefs in other STEM disciplines.

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.