Huge Study Finds Professors' Attitudes Affect Students' Grades (arstechnica.com)

A huge study at Indiana University, led by Elizabeth Canning, finds that the attitudes of instructors affect the grades their students earned in classes. The researchers conducted their study by sending out a simple survey to all the instructors of STEM courses at Indiana University, asking whether professors felt that a student's intelligence is fixed and unchanging or whether they thought it could be developed. Then, the researchers were given access to two years' worth of students' grades in those instructors' classes, covering a total of 15,000 students. Ars Technica reports: The results showed a surprising difference between the professors who agreed that intelligence is fixed and those who disagreed (referred to as "fixed mindset" and "growth mindset" professors). In classes taught by fixed mindset instructors, Latino, African-American, and Native American students averaged grades 0.19 grade points (out of four) lower than white and Asian-American students. But in classes taught by "growth mindset" instructors, the gap dropped to just 0.10 grade points. No other factor the researchers analyzed showed a statistically significant difference among classes -- not the instructors' experience, tenure status, gender, specific department, or even ethnicity. Yet their belief about whether a students' intelligence is fixed seems to have had a sizable effect.

The students' course evaluations contain possible clues. Students reported less "motivation to do their best work" in the classes taught by fixed mindset professors, and they also gave lower ratings for a question about whether their professor "emphasize[d] learning and development." Students were less likely to say they'd recommend the professor to others, as well. Is it possible that the fixed mindset professors just happen to teach the hardest classes? The student evaluations also include a question about how much time the course required -- the average answer was slightly higher for fixed mindset professors, but the difference was not statistically significant. Instead, the researchers think the data suggests that -- in any number of small ways -- instructors who think their students' intelligence is fixed don't keep their students as motivated, and perhaps don't focus as much on teaching techniques that can encourage growth. And while this affects all students, it seems to have an extra impact on underrepresented minority students.

Comments

Not exactly

[rsilvergun]

the original purpose of institutionalized learning was to prepare farm workers to work in factories. They kept walking off the assembly lines because they couldn't understand the concept of a job that was never done. Plow the fields and plant the crops? Done. Build a widget? Build the next one. This is why we have bells in schools, btw. They're to condition you for factory bells.

Over time education like I described above (intended for the working class) was mixed with principles of an entirely different branch of education: what the ruling class gets. This is where "well rounded" educations came from. The idea was to teach critical thinking skills to people who didn't think critically by nature. You typically did this with the liberal arts instead of STEM because while there's no value in getting a math problem half right there _is_ value in being half right on your critical understanding of a book.

The "well rounded" education is used to make sure your offspring can go off and effectively run your dynasty when your old/dead. You needed them to think critically or they'd get killed by an ambitious member of your court.

In an proper world without the constant meddling of the ruling class everyone would get both a practical (working class) education and the "well rounded" one that was usually reserved for the ruling class. You might not know this, but you want this. You want this a lot. Ignorant people make bad decisions. If you're a member of the ruling class you can exploit those bad decisions for your gain. If you're not those people become an angry mob and kill you. Or you join the mob, which sounds fun until you stop and think about the decades of poverty that lead up to you joining that mob.

Re:Bull

[epine]

By the way, Einstein was no Einstein in school, and not really a very good mathematician.

I know someone very smart, who is currently doing graduate work in logic, who actually bothered to go to a library (perhaps it was Princeton) to take a boo through some of Einstein's original manuscripts.

Somewhere in there, he found something like nine pages of notes over the course of which Einstein essentially taught himself four-dimensional differential geometry. He said it was an extremely efficient self-course, setting a pace he couldn't imagine himself.

Not long ago I audited about five hours of Susskind's introduction to GR. (About 200 hours of Susskind's lectures are available on YouTube.)

Adding the Lorentz transform was pretty straightforward, but then when you add accelerating frames of reference, you're left with a deep problem, which actually stumped Einstein for some while.

Eventually, he wrote down the Einstein metric:
        G mu nu = R mu nu - 1/2 R g mu nu
and the rest was history.

Susskind commented that this was quite a bit worse that QED, because gravitation self-interacts far more than EM (I think his analogy was to imagine photons that also carry charge).

Neither of these anecdotes in any way supports the idea of Einstein as a weak mathematician, though clearly his intuition in writing down the right problem greatly exceeded his formal abilities.

My friend concluded that what Einstein really when he commented something to the effect of "if you think you have problems, they're nothing compared to mine" was relative to the task at hand: inventing a whole new metric tensor.

Furthermore, Einstein probably was Einstein in school, it's just that no teacher ever set a test in writing down the right problems (rather than the right answers). Having such a gift at writing down the right problem, one can imagine why he didn't exert himself in the competition to write down answers to the tired problems of yesterday.

This can be viewed through the economic lens of comparative advantage at an individual scale. You might just be the best person alive on the planet at writing down the right problem (this is not easy). Should you invest your marginal effort in developing that capacity, or in polishing apple's for your teacher, using a skillset where you are definitively ordinary (formalism) as compared to Poincare or Riemann? Where being merely Poincare or Riemann would be a definite step down, as compared to your one true gift.