The ways in which community colleges and other institutions structure their students’ learning experience through policy, pedagogy and practice can play a significant role in shaping students’ academic mindset, according to a new report released this week from the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE).
CCCSE’s report, “A Mind at Work: Maximizing the Relationship between Mindset and Student Success,” notes that cultivating a more productive academic mindset – the student’s belief that they can change their intelligence, be confident in their ability to learn challenging material and accomplish difficult tasks – can increase students’ levels of engagement, raise their GPAs and positively impact their collegiate success.
“A Mind at Work” signals an opportunity for community colleges to use a mindset lens to reform their approaches to grow students’ productive academic mindset by helping students process setbacks, improving their advising experience and providing professional development to faculty around mindset development, among other strategies.
“Ten years ago, you wouldn’t have had as many colleges making orientation mandatory [or] having first-year students be required to take a student success course. All of those things are creating a sense of belonging,” said Dr. Evelyn N. Waiwaiole, executive director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement. “The colleges are being much more intentional about it.”
CCCSE’s report offers results from the first large set of data on mindset in community colleges. It focuses on four “interconnected” components of academic mindset: growth vs. fixed mindset; self-efficacy, relevance of academic experience; and sense of belonging.
Researchers received responses from 82,821 students from 159 colleges about academic mindset as part of the 2018 Community College Survey of Student Engagement. The center then divided students into seven groups depending on their responses, with Group 1 students having the strongest nonproductive mindset and Group 7 students having the strongest productive mindset.
Few students have “fully productive” or “fully nonproductive” mindsets, the report found. Most students have a partially productive or mixed mindset and fall within Group 4 (nearly four out of 10 students).
