Several correlative findings support the idea that having a growth mindset instructor benefits students' motivation and emotions. However, experimental evidence is rare. Therefore, we tested the effects of teachers' mindsets on students through an experiment involving 306 preservice teachers and 298 seventh graders from Germany. Specifically, we explored how fostering growth mindsets in preservice teachers affects their self-reported instructional practices, their written school career counseling of a low-performing fictitious student, and students' perceptions of the counseling and the preservice teacher.
After participating in a brief teacher-targeted growth mindset intervention (Heyder et al., 2023), preservice teachers anticipated to use more practices that stimulate autonomy and cognitive activation than those in the control group. Qualitative and computer-based quantitative analyses of the counseling texts revealed that the intervention group teachers offered significantly more personal help, wrote longer texts, and used a more diverse vocabulary in their counseling than the control group teachers.
We then randomly assigned the counseling texts to 298 students (average age 12) without providing any information about the preservice teacher who wrote the text. Students rated the quality of the counseling, the teacher's mindset, and the social support expected from the teacher based solely on the counseling text. We found that students' perceptions of teachers' mindsets, the quality of the counseling, and the anticipated social support were significantly correlated with the teachers' self-reported mindset. The more teachers believed in fixed student ability, the more students perceived them to do so, the lower they rated the quality of the counseling, and the less social support they anticipated from the teacher.
Ongoing text analyses aim to explore which text characteristics influenced students' ratings. Overall, the experimental results support the idea that teachers' mindsets matter for students and suggest that (written) school career counseling is a way of transmission