Differential Learning Mindsets: How Praising promotes Student’s Motivation February 15, 2010
Posted by treble4mi in : Understanding Motivation , 3 commentsHaving taught at Fletcher’s Meadow Secondary School for a little more than a semester, I grow more intrigued about what I now firmly believe to be a major barrier to student’s learning and success – motivation. Motivation is not really a new concept to me. In fact, I have been introduced to and learned extensively about it in teacher’s college at OISE, much more than I ever thought of it before. What I have discovered, I think, which made it seems new and amazing to me is the understanding of its impact on students!
Motivation is one of those puzzling yet interesting aspects of human character that I never quite clearly understand, at least in a mechanistic sense. Whenever I observe non-receptive responses towards a given activity in a classroom, either as a student or an educator, the question of why some students are more readily at accepting challenges than the others would find its way into my thoughts. As a self-motivated learner, it is shocking to find and difficult to believe that not everyone has the same level of enthusiasm when it comes to learning and/or doing challenging activities. It is totally against my belief that learning or anything related to it is not fun, but then again, this is only my belief. In my logical search for plausible answers as to why such divergence of attitudes exists, I arrive at some common factors. These include but are of course not exclusive to:
a) the nature of the given activity [eg. is the assigned activity appropriately interesting?]
b) the physical state of the students [eg. are they feeling fatigue, stressed at the time?]
c) and other temperaments [eg. do they exhibit a quiet, timid and/or fearful of embarrassment or failure type of personality?]
Although the presented list is small, each represents respectively a broader category of effectors that potentially can have an impact on an individual’s motivation:
a) extrinsic or external factors
b) physical capabilities
c) emotional barriers
Further reading led me to a recent research done by a psychologist at Standford University, Carol Dweck, who uncovers a forth category: intellectual belief where students are described to exhibit different learning mindsets.
In her book Mindsets: The new psychology of success (2006), Dweck found that students hold one of two sets of beliefs in intelligence which she coined the term growth and fixed mindsets. Whereas growth mindsets, according to her, are malleable and can develop, fixed mindsets have the opposite characteristics. In a study Dweck did at the University of Hong Kong where all classes are conducted in English, she and her colleagues approached a large group of social-sciences students, told them their English-proficiency scores, and asked the students if they wanted to take a remedial course to improve their language skills. One would expect those who scored poorly would jump at the opportunity but interestingly, only students who believed in malleable intelligence or held a belief that their skills can improve accepted the offer. The other students who believed that their intelligence was genetically pre-determined preferred to stay home. Dweck explained that “students who hold a fixed view of their intelligence care so much about looking smart that they act dumb for what could be dumber than giving up a chance to learn something that is essential for your own success?” Although I agree with the author that it was an unwise decision for students to not take the remedial course especially when they received a poor score on the test, it was not clear to me how this particular observation supports her assertion that students having a fixed mindset also concern about appearing publicly deficient of the reverse relationship. I think that there is insufficient evidence here to make such connections because I believe even students who hold a growth mindset may also have a similar view about failing at times. What is important, however, is the powerful notion that if the students believe that they can learn, change and develop the needed skills, they are more likely to participate in class activities and tackle challenges.
As a learning educator, I appreciate the implication this idea contributes to the way I create my lesson plans. It explains the psychological importance behind scaffolding. This is because with every step achieved in the scaffolding process, the students build stronger confidence in not only their abilities to doing things but also in their belief that they indeed can learn, change and develop the needed skills, hence will be more open to challenges. During my previous teaching experience where I practiced the scaffolding pedagogy, I observed that students seemed to enjoy completing my assigned activities and laboratory assignments. At the time, since I only understood that scaffolding approach enables the students to build on prior knowledge one step at a time, I thought this was responsible for my classroom success. As I am now aware of Dweck theory, scaffolding now has a new meaning.
The most important concept I learned from Dweck research, however, is that our praise has an impact on shaping the belief students have about their intelligence, hence their motivation for learning. Her experiment with a class of preadolescent students demonstrated that on one hand, students who were praised for their intelligence are more likely to adopt a fixed mindset and so was reluctant to tackle difficult tasks. On the other hand, students who were praised for their effort oriented their belief more towards a growth mindset. This finding is profound in my opinion because if offers an action which educators and/or parents can adopt to foster the students with interest in learning. If we encourage the students’ efforts, rather than intelligence, we acknowledge their persistence and hard work, which will support their development of a growth mindset. If students are re-enforced for their effort, persistence and hard work, they come to understand that learning and intelligence are not fixed entities. This will in turn better equip students to learn, persist, and pick themselves up to try again when things initially fail.
Although it is important to emphasize effort instead of intelligence when praising, it is as equally important to appropriately praise the students for the work they have done. If one constantly praises for every work the students completed or randomly praises without knowing if the students actually work hard for the assigned activity, the students may question your sincerity and judgement which may lead to undesired consequences. This led me to think about how students’ effort can possibly be monitored and measured when they are not working in class. One of the ways to address the concern is to encourage students to create a real-time, visual record of their activities when working outside of class setting. Two of my colleagues, namely Mirjan and Graham, have been trying out the two following online programs that I thought would be a great tool to implement for the above purpose. These services allow students to put together video clips using a series of digital photographs.
www.stupedflix.com (from Mirjan)
www.animato.com (from Graham)
Combining the knowledge of growth mindset, which encourages students to be more comfortable in tackling challenges and learning, and the effect on the development of this mindset through praising students’ effort, I expect to perform better in my future educational experiences. This is because I have a much better understanding of student’s psychology towards learning now which bridges, I believe, the connections between students’ learning success and motivation.
Reference:
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.
Taking a Scientific Perspective on Same Gender Schooling System January 19, 2010
Posted by treble4mi in : Sciences behind Education , 2 commentsHello, and welcome to my blog page! My name is Dao Tran, a new science teacher in the eEducational world. I’m a person with little to say but when it comes to making connection and lateral thinking, you will find that not only that I have much to contribute, but I also get much delight from doing it. So if and while you are walking alongside with me in this new journey, I hope each step that is taken will be firmer and clearer than the one before…
Below is an essay written a year ago for one of my elective courses required for my B.Ed degree at OISE - The Adolescent Brain. It was a preliminary attempt at showing how scientific research can aid educational decision. Posting it as my introductory blog I feel most suiting because it reflects who I am better than I could ever describe.
Introduction
Striving to provide an equal opportunity for learning in mixed-interest and ability classrooms, especially at the secondary education level, is an ongoing struggle for teachers and curriculum planners. The desire to achieve equity in classrooms draws from the belief that students are more successful at learning when they are placed among other students who share similar interest and can be appropriately challenged. The former problem involving student’s interest is partially dealt with through the invention of elective credits, which allows students the options to select their subjects of study. The latter problem poses a greater challenge because different students learn differently. Therefore, to accommodate a diverse array of learning styles and abilities, several modified versions of the curriculum for each grade level are offered to high school students. To add to the complexity of this matter, recent findings in adolescent brain research showing gender-specific brain developmental trajectories provide supporting evidence that boys and girls learn in different ways (Hanlon et al. 1999; Rhoshel et al. 2007). The report informs a new concern for many educators and asserts them to review coeducation because this traditional teaching method evidently disregards gender differences in learning style (Boyatzis et al. 1993; Labarthe, 1997). However, whether adopting separate genders schooling system (i.e. all girls or boys school) will lead to an equitable learning environment for students remains controversial and debatable. This is because although teaching methods can be made gender-specific, gender as recognized by sexual anatomy (i.e. boys or girls) is not always reflective of the individual’s sexual orientation (i.e. male or female). Studies in fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, demonstrate that sexuality and sexual behaviour are somehow built into the nervous system and certain related genes such as fruitless can create a difference in the male and female brain irrespective of the sexual anatomy (Yamamoto, 2007). This therefore indicates a genetic component involved in regulating sexuality, at least in this model organism.
Validating Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism for human biological processes
Sexuality, as any complex animal biological trait, is complicated, as it composes of numerous separable but interacting neural circuits that form a hierarchy in the nervous system. On the one hand, both humans and animals possess amazing abilities to learn and to adapt to the external environment, suggesting an enormous flexibility in the formation of these neural circuits (Blakemore and Frith, 2007). On the other hand, we know that brain formation and function is controlled by genes (Ooi and Wood, 2008). It is, therefore, unlikely that genes would fail to have an impact on some aspects of our personalities and behaviour, including sexuality. However, understanding how genes affect animal sexuality has proving to be notoriously difficult especially in organisms with limited access to genetic analyses and manipulations such as ourselves. Fortunately, heredity plays a major role in some animal behaviour and certain organisms like Drosophila offer a convenient genetic system with readily available tools for scientists to study these innate patterns of animal activities. Although distant evolutionarily from humans, Drosophila has been a workhorse for countless laboratory researches, among which sprung many important scientific discoveries. This is because studies have repeatedly demonstrated a considerable degree of conservation of fundamental biological processes and mechanisms between fruit flies and humans proving them useful and powerful as a model organism (Bier, 2005; Doronkin and Reiter, 2008). For instance, Drosophila researches shed insights into humans aging processes (Tower, 2006); long term memories (Wu and Chiang, 2008); genetic diseases including Usher Syndrome (D’Alterio et al. 2005), vascular diseases (Horowitz and Simons, 2008) and cancer (Casci and Freeman, 1999). Therefore, it is only reasonable to regard information obtained on the molecular mechanisms underlying sexuality in Drosophila as with other topics of research, that is, with a similar acceptance and appreciation while being fully aware of the fact that flies and humans are evolutionarily different.
The story of Fruitless
The fruit fly courtship ritual consists of six steps carried out in a specific order (Hall, 1994; Sokolowski, 2001). First, the male senses the presence of a female and follows her. Then he taps the female with his foreleg, which triggers pheromone cues. Soon after that the male extends a wing and vibrates it, producing a species-specific courtship song. The fourth step involves licking the female’s genitalia with his proboscis, followed by attempted copulation and, if he succeeds in impressing the female, copulation (Sokolowski, 2001). Female’s part of the ritual is rather dull. Simply, she either lets the male impregnate her or not. Most importantly, females never initiate the mating ritual (Hall, 1994; Emmons and Lipton, 2003).
Fruitless (Fru) has been shown to be responsible for the formation of the male specific abdominal muscle of Lawrence and implicated in the control of male sexual behaviour (Anand et al. 2001; Villella et al. 1997; Goodwin et al. 2000). The most severe fru genotypes almost completely abolish all steps of male courtship. For example, while wild-type males choose to approach females rather than males as the appropriate sexual partner, fru mutant males fail to distinguish between the sexes and as a consequence court females and males roughly equally (Ryner et al. 1996; Villella et al. 1997; Goodwin et al. 2000). At a later stage of courtship, when wild-type males extend a wing and vibrate it to produce a courtship song, certain fru mutants occasionally extend their wing toward females but do not produce courtship song (Ryner et al. 1996; Villella et al. 1997).
The expression of fru is controlled by four different promoters (P1, P2, P3 and P4) that yield four different sets of transcripts (mRNA) (Ryner et al. 1996). The transcript produced by P1 undergoes sex-specific splicing resulting in differential removal of a region of a coding sequence in this gene, namely the S exon, in male and female flies (Ryner et al. 1996; Ito et al. 1996). While the male-specific protein, FruM, are found at high level in the CNS, the female-specific protein, FruF, is present at very low levels, if at all (Ryner et al. 1996; Lee et al. 2000; Usui-Aoki et al. 2005).
These studies suggested that the fruitless gene might play a key role in building the neuronal circuitry for male courtship into the fly’s brain. This circuit, detected by the expression of FruM was found to be comprised of ca. 1,500 neurons, roughtly 1.5 percent of the total number of nerve cells in a fruit fly (Ryner et al. 1996; Goodwin et al. 2000; Lee et al. 1996). The FruM expression peaks at about two days into the pupal period. Subsequently, the number of cells expressing FruM decreases gradually so that by the end of the pupal period transcripts are detected in only ca. 500 cells. FruM remains detectable in a high proportion of these cells throughout this time period and into young adults (Ryner et al. 1996; Goodwin et al. 2000; Lee et al. 1996). It was found that 60 neural cells in the CNS carried out the crucial task of coordinating the steps of the courtship ritual (Manoli et al. 2004). When those 60 cells did not function properly, the male was unlikely to successfully mate, turning into a clumsy, ineffective suitor. This study for the first time described an identifiable set of cells in the CNS that serves to conform each of the subroutines that make up this behaviour: licking, tapping and so forth, providing a strong evidence for the idea that subroutines are somehow built into the nervous system.
How Fru works?
Important evidence that fru is the gene normally controlling most male sex behaviour in the fruit fly emerged from the fact that it fits in a hierarchy of genes that governs all other aspects of Drosophila sex as well (Ryner et al. 1996; Ito et al. 1996; Heinrichs et al. 1998; Baker et al. 2001). As mentioned previously, both male and female fruit fly express Fru, but their protein products have different forms due to differential splicing of the Fru gene transcripts (mRNA). In females, female-specific sexless (Sxl) gene directs the splicing of transformer (tra) gene, which regulates female-specific splicing of doublesex (dsx) and fru mRNAs. In males, the absence of Tra protein leads to the male-specific splicing of dsx and fru mRNAs (Manoli et al. 2004). Recent works in honeybees reveal a similar function for tra-related gene, feminizer, in the sex determining pathway of this species, thus providing the initial evidence showing that a genetic mechanism underlying sexuality may indeed be conserved (Hasselmann et al. 2008). As male dsx commands the development of male sex organs and other male characteristics and male fru commands male sexual behaviour, Sexless and Tra act to turn off fru in females so that these flies do not exhibit male sex organs or behaviour (Manoli et al. 2004). These findings on fru provided a great deal of insight into the question of how sexual behaviour and sexual orientation are specified by genes and controlled by the nervous system.
How is that done?
To show that fru regulates sexual orientation, scientists engineered female flies to have male-splicing of the fru gene FruM and male flies to have female-splicing of the fru gene FruF (Demir and Dickson, 2005; Manoli et al. 2005). Despite changes in their sexual behaviours, it is interesting to note that these transgenic flies did not display any defects in their sexual anatomy.
The most striking observation from these studies is that female flies expressing FruM behave like males. They direct at other females a sexual display nearly identical to their male counterparts and reject a normal male the way a male would do, flicking their wings and kicking (Demir and Dickson, 2005; Manoli et al. 2005). This effect is exacerbated, by mating these females with males artificially expressing female pheromones (Demir and Dickson, 2005). Interestingly, however, the females never attempt to copulate which might be due to the anatomical differences.
Conversely, male flies expressing FruF lose their ability to court females (Demir and Dickson, 2005; Manoli et al. 2005). They are also more likely to court other males suggesting that male-specific fru splicing not only promotes male-female courtship, but also inhibits male-male courtship. Now remembering that females never initiate the act of courting, this result comes as a surprise. It appears that these FruF males do not lose their appetite for courting suggesting that Fru might not be sufficient to reverse all aspects of sexual behaviour?
To understand exactly how fru control male-specific reproductive behaviour, transgenic flies carrying a sensitive marker for the FruM-expressing cells in the male and female CNS were generated and analyzed (Manoli et al. 2005; Stockinger et al. 2005). This marker allows visual detection of Fru proteins in neural cells. In the male, the fru gene products were found in 21 neuronal clusters in the brain and ventral nerve cord, matching the previous reports (Lee et al. 2000; Billeter et al. 2004). Unlike previously, however, the expression of FruM was also detected in the neurons of the olfactory, gustatory, and auditory systems (Manoli et al. 2005; Stockinger et al. 2005). Selectively labelling the FruM-positive afferent olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs), located on the fly’s antenna, Stockinger et al. discovered that these are connected to the known sexually dimorphic glomeruli in the fly antennal lobe which form synapses with processes of second-order neurons such as the projection neurons (PNs). Interestingly, FruM-positive PNs innervate the same glomeruli as ORNs, suggesting that they might be synaptic partners and therefore form a neuronal circuit (Manoli et al. 2005).
Using fly strain expressing GFP under the control of the P1 fru promoter, Yamamoto and colleagues (2005) discovered sex differences in cells transcribing fru in the optic lobe and in a region dorsal to the antennal lobe. Focusing on the somata of the antennal-lobe neurons called “medially located just above antennal lobe” (mAL), they found that male flies had about 30 fru-expressing neurons in the mAL cluster, while females had only about 5 homologous cells. They also found obvious differences in morphology of mAL neurons. Male neurons extend bilateral projections, while female neurons send only contralateral projections (Yamamoto et al. 2005). Female mAL neurons also show forked arborisation, while male neurons never show this pattern. When male flies are engineered to produce non-functional FruM, they have the same number of mAL neurons as normal females and their neurons have mainly female-like morphology (Kimura et al. 2005). Conversely, tra mutant females, expressing Fru protein in mAL neurons show male-like numbers and shapes of neurons (Kimura et al. 2005). These results for the first time provide an insight into how a gene, fruitless, actually creates differences between female and male brains.
Implication in education
Researches on fruitless demonstrate that Drosophila sexuality is affected by the presence or absence of Fru expression (Yamamoto 2007). The results include observable changes to their sexual behaviours (i.e. females behaving like male flies and vice versa) and brain morphology. Despite having these changes, the physical sexual anatomies of these flies that distinguish them as males or females do not change. This therefore indicates that physical sexual anatomy does not exclusively dictate the sexuality of the fly. When such information applies cautiously to humans (as research on our species is not as advance as that of fruit fly), it can be suggested that perhaps sexuality in humans is also not consistent with his/her sexual anatomy. This is an important point to consider because it suggests that even in a single gender school system (eg. all girls or all boys), coeducation may still persist, which therefore questions the benefits of gender-specific teaching methods.
