My current research interests focus on how messaging about belonging, ability mindset, and values communicated by the environment (in the form of media, professors, teachers, peers, etc) can impact underserved students’ experiences in STEM education. My qualifying project explores how the classroom remarks related to belonging (encouraged by the instructors’ own personal experiences when they were taking the class) made by STEM instructors on the first day of class can “set the scene” for students, potentially affecting their sense of belonging in the course. I was drawn to Muenks et al. (2020) paper because study 1 uses similar stimuli and measurements to my qualifying project. In particular, the researchers created video clips of the first section of a made-up calculus I class that highlighted either fixed or growth mindset ability beliefs from the instructor. Study 1 found that students who perceived their instructor to endorse more fixed mindset beliefs reported less belonging in the class, higher impostor feelings, and higher evaluation anxiety.
Study 1 had 255 prolific participants who indicated that they were currently enrolled in college. These participants were randomly assigned to watch a video clip of the first section of a calculus class (either growth mindset condition, fixed mindset condition, or control condition). The experiment manipulates the instructor’s endorsement of mindset beliefs depicted in video clips of the first section of a calculus class. The script of the video clips goes through course syllabus policies but reflects the instructor’s ability mindset beliefs with language indicating who should be taking the class (if it was the control video clip, no ability mindset belief language was used). After students watch the video clip, they were asked a series of survey questions regarding their perception of the class and instructor. In particular, the study was interested in observing how it affected their belonging, interest, and motivation in the class by using Likert-scale response items. The study had 255 prolific participants who indicated that they were currently enrolled in college.
In order to replicate this experiment, I would need to create video clips using the script provided in the original paper’s supplementary materials (in the same repo folder as the original paper). Some challenges I expect to encounter are 1) it is unclear if the researchers showed the actual instructor on the screen or used a PowerPoint presentation (showing the course syllabus policies) with audio coming from the instructor. For the sake of my replication, I will be using a PowerPoint presentation with audio coming from the instructor so that I reduce potential confounds when displaying an actual instructor (i.e. the way the professor looks, dresses, acts, etc). 2) I want the audio coming from the instructor to be the same tone across all conditions (i.e. not one condition sounding more energetic than the others). It is unclear in the original experiment how they controlled for this, but for this replication, I will be using AI-generated audio of a white, male voice to make sure the audio sounds similar across all conditions. 3) The experiment didn’t control for participants who may have already taken calculus (which could influence their belonging and interest), so if my sample of prolific students has more people that took many math classes, this could affect the results of the experiment. It might be worth including items that measure prior exposure to the class.
Link to the Repository: https://github.com/psych251/Muenks2020#
Link to the original paper and supplementary materials: https://github.com/psych251/Muenks2020/tree/main/original_paper