Collaborative Research: Promoting a Growth Mindset Using Automated Feedback

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The "Promoting a Growth Mindset Using Automated Feedback" project will develop and evaluate a new strategy for generating automated feedback on programming assignments that will provide a more welcoming experience for students, recognizing the effort they put in as they work on solutions. The goal of the project will be to promote the adoption of a "growth mindset" - a belief that one's abilities will improve with practice and hard work, which is associated with a range of improved educational outcomes. This strategy will encompass four key ideas: a measurement approach for assessing student effort; the use of non-points-based bonuses to reward effort and recognize hard work for positive reinforcement; heat maps of student code to highlight where bugs are located; and a strategy for clearly identifying the top priority for students to tackle in order to make progress. During the first year of the project, all three schools will collect baseline data using existing "conventional" feedback approaches. The new feedback intervention will be evaluated in years two and three of the project. Quantitative and qualitative data will be collected and analyzed to examine changes in performance and students' behavior. A mixed-method data collection plan will triangulate the quantitative and qualitative data with the review of literature and the researchers' direct experience in teaching these courses to reach conclusions regarding research questions of the study and provide the framework for the design of a scalable and replicable intervention to improve students' performance in the programming projects.