Growth mindset and & Questioning

This year’s objective  To develop deep and probing questioning for teaching/memory that elicits students to think hard, supporting a culture of ‘growth mindset’ and questioning for assessment that informs teaching.  To embed a culture of ‘growth mindset’ across our learning community in order to raise aspirations and expectations of what students can achieve.

Hub 2: Objectives  Review techniques trialled since Hub 1.  Fostering a growth mindset when questioning.  Designing good quality Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) to improve memory.

Review of trial(s) Common comments (+ and -) : - Students still putting hands up (signal?) - Loss of pace (Vs increased pace) - Not all students engaged (e.g. when answers lengthy) - Collaboration / revisiting students - Teacher selecting students is preferred?

A Growth Mindset The power of belief 34FNbOKXc

“The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.” Carole S Dweck

Genius? Research studying geniuses and/or great creative contributions is yielding findings to suggest that talent alone cannot explain these phenomena. Instead the one thing that appears to set those who become geniuses or who make great creative contributions apart from their other talented peers is the deliberate practice they devote to their field (Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich, & Hoffman, 2006). In other words, genius often appears to be developed over time through focused, extended effort. This is precisely the kind of effort fostered by a growth mindset.

Interventions that change mindsets (Blackwell, et al., 2007)

In addition, teachers (blind to whether students were in the control group or the growth mindset (experimental) group, singled out three times as many students in the experimental group as showing notable changes in their motivation (27% in the experimental group vs. 9% in the control group).

Math Achievement Test Scores Following Growth Mindset Workshop Vs. Control Workshop (Good, et al., 2003),

What does it mean?  The research demonstrates that changing students’ mind-sets can have a substantial impact on achievement.  The impact of the growth mindset workshops endured long enough to boost end-of-term measures of achievement.  It will be important to follow students over longer periods of time to see whether the gains last, but it is likely that environmental support is necessary for them to do so (e.g. it will be important to have teachers who subscribe to a growth mindset).

Developing a growth mind set to support challenging questioning. How do we get students to be willing to accept being challenged and not fear making mistakes or being wrong? Helen Hindle comments that we need to model a growth mindset for students.

Dealing with…. I don’t know! I can’t! I don’t get it! What can we do to help students?

Instead of I don’t know:

 Show students how to recognize fixed mind-set thoughts, how to stop them, and how to replace them with growth mind-set thoughts.  Make the rule that fixed mind-set thoughts spoken aloud in your class will be stopped, and the student will need to rephrase the idea as a growth mind-set thought, by doing so you will help students recognize fixed mind-set thoughts.  You will also help students monitor each other and shift their thoughts toward growth. Using language to model a growth mindset

Modelling through language Try…Instead of… I didn’t get it right this time, but I’m going to improve. I failed What am I missing? I can get better at this. I'm so stupid. I seem to be on the right track.I'm awesome at this. I’m going to practice this and train my brain to do maths. I just can’t do Maths. This is going to take some time and I’m going to need to try hard. This is too hard. I’m going to work out how he / she’s doing it. She / He’s so smart, I wish I was as smart. Can I improve my answer?My answer is fine the way it is.

My Favourite ‘No’ routine

 One of the key ideas suggested to improve student recall is regular testing (where students are required to retrieve information) as it helps commit the content to their long term memory.  One suggested method of regular testing is using multiple choice questions and there is much discussion surrounding this at the moment. Improving memory and retention

Why some people are put off by MCQ…  Some people consider multiple choice exams easier than essay or open ended exams because:  The correct answer is guaranteed to be among the possible responses. A student can score points with a lucky guess.  Many multiple choice exams tend to emphasise basic definitions or simple comparisons, rather than asking students to analyse new information or apply theories to new situations.  Because multiple choice exams usually contain many more questions than essay exams, each question has a lower point value and thus offers less risk.  Because students can see the correct answer, it does not help with retrieval and memory.

 Little, Bjork and Bjork tested whether multiple-choice tests could trigger productive retrieval processes - provided the alternatives were made plausible enough to enable test takers to retrieve both why the correct alternatives were correct and why the incorrect alternatives were incorrect. 2 experiments concluded that: - Properly constructed multiple-choice tests can trigger productive retrieval processes - AND multiple-choice tests also facilitated recall of information pertaining to incorrect alternatives (something cued-recall tests did not). Therefore, multiple-choice tests can be constructed so that they exercise the very retrieval processes they have been accused of bypassing. Multiple Choice Questions…

Joe Kirby Using MCQs - make assessment more reliable - marking less labour-intensive - pupil understanding and misconceptions more visible As long as they are constructed properly that they get pupils thinking deeply about subject content. Suggests 7 principles for designing good MCQ:

1: The proximity of options increases the rigour of the question

2: The number of incorrect options increases rigour - 3 options gives pupils a 33% chance of guessing correctly - 5 five options reduces the chances of guessing to 20%; Kirby recommends always creating 5, rather than 3 or 4 options. A ‘don’t know’ option prevents pupils from blindly guessing, allowing them to flag up questions they’re unsure about rather than getting lucky with a correct guess.

3. Incorrect options should be plausible but unambiguously wrong If options are too implausible, this reduces rigour as pupils can too quickly dismiss them. However, there should be no ambiguity regarding the correct answer.

4. Incorrect options should be frequent misconceptions where possible

5. Multiple correct options make a question more rigorous. Not stating how many correct options there are makes pupils think harder.

6. The occasional negative question encourages kids to read the questions more carefully. Once they get a question like ‘Which of these is NOT a cause of World War 1?‘ wrong, and realise why, they’ll work out they need to read questions again to double- check on what it is they’re asking.

7. Stretch questions can be created with comparisons or connections between topics.

Making them think: Designing MCQ to promote deep thinking Pick a unit/topic from your subject area and design some Multiple Choice questions that could be used to form an assessment.

Measuring our impact?  Peer observations?  IRIS self observations/evaluations?  Student Voice?  Data comparison with other classes?