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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN
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:
Using language to model a growth
mindset

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…
I didn’t get it right this time, but I’m
going to improve.
What am I missing?
I can get better at this.
I seem to be on the right track.
I’m going to practice this and train my
brain to do maths.
This is going to take some time and I’m
going to need to try hard.
I’m going to work out how he / she’s
doing it.
Can I improve my answer?
Instead of…
I failed
I'm so stupid.
I'm awesome at this.
I just can’t do Maths.
This is too hard.
She / He’s so smart, I wish I was as
smart.
My answer is fine the way it is.
My Favourite ‘No’
https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/class-warm-uproutine
Improving memory and retention

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.
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.
Multiple Choice Questions…

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.
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 doublecheck 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?