This quantitative study examined student participation in an introductory project-based engineering course offered in fully face-to-face and hybrid course modes (N = 160). This course attempted to counteract trends of decreased student motivation and high attrition rates among engineering majors. Mixed-design analysis of variance examined differences in motivational constructs including student self-efficacy, effort regulation, and interest in engineering, as well as engineering skills throughout the course and across instructional modes. None of the motivational constructs were associated with significant decreases throughout the course nor with differences across instructional modes. However, students’ engineering skills increased throughout the course with no significant differences across course modalities. Furthermore, interest in engineering and effort regulation were positively associated with course performance. The instructional modality was not significantly associated with course performance. Overall, this study provides an example of a project-based introductory engineering course which may help maintain student motivation and foster student success in engineering. © The Author(s) 2021.

Beliefs play a central role in human development. For instance, a growth mindset-a belief about the malleability of intelligence-can shape how adolescents interpret and respond to academic difficulties and how they subsequently navigate the educational system. But do usually-adaptive beliefs have the same effects for adolescents regardless of the contexts they are in? Answering this question can reveal new insights into classic developmental questions about continuity and change. Here we present the Mindset x Context framework and we apply this model to the instructive case of growth mindset interventions. We show that teaching students a growth mindset is most effective in educational contexts that provide affordances for a growth mindset; that is, contexts that permit and encourage students to view ability as developable and to act on that belief. This evidence contradicts the beliefs alone hypothesis, which holds that teaching adolescents a growth mindset is enough and that students can profit from these beliefs in almost any context, even unsupportive ones. The Mindset x Context framework leads to the realization that in order to produce more widespread and lasting change, we must complement the belief-changing interventions that have been aimed at students with new interventions that guide teachers toward classroom policies and practices that allow students' growth mindset beliefs to take root and yield benefits.

Introduction: Experiencing low support from teachers can be associated with low academic achievement. Nonetheless, individual- (i.e., ability self-concepts) and contextual-level (i.e., parental support) protective factors may help adolescents to display academic resilience. This study examined whether high school students? math ability self-concepts and parental support can mitigate the possible negative association between perceived low math teacher support and their math achievement. Method: Correlational data were drawn from the High School Longitudinal Study (N = 14,580, Mage =17.42 in 11th grade, 51% female), a nationally representative study of high school students in the U.S. The measures of protective factors (i.e., math ability self-concepts and parental support) were obtained from the surveys administered to students and parents in 9th grade. Students? perceived teacher support and their math achievement score were measured in 11th grade. A series of linear regression analyses were estimated to test our hypotheses. Results & Conclusions: Perceived low teacher support was negatively associated with adolescents? math achievement. Adolescents? math ability self-concepts were directly and positively associated with their math achievement. The interaction between perceived low teacher support and ability self-concepts in predicting adolescents? achievement varied by parental support. The association between perceived low teacher support and adolescents? math achievement was not statistically significant when adolescents were high on one of the protective factors. That is, high parental support may be protective for adolescents with low math ability self-concepts. This study highlights the interaction between adolescents? academic motivation and parental support in demonstrating resilience to perceived low teacher support.

Individuals' math motivational beliefs are theorized to shape their STEM achievement and engagement in high school and beyond. Combining situated expectancy-value theory and intersectionality framework, the goals of this study were to (a) identify the unique patterns of U.S. high school students' math motivational beliefs, (b) examine differences in the patterns based on the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity, and (c) test the extent to which these patterns predicted differences in students' math achievement and classroom behavioral engagement for each of the gender by racial/ethnic groups. The current study included 16,120 high schoolers (50% female; 63% White, 17% Latina/o, 11% Black, and 9% Asian Americans; Mage = 14.46 at Grade 9) from the High School Longitudinal Study. There were six unique patterns of students' math motivational beliefs: Overall High, Above Average but not Identified, Identified but Average Value, Average, Low Identity, and Overall Low. Pattern membership at the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity showed nuances that could not be represented by gender or race/ethnicity alone; for example, male and female Asian American adolescents had similar patterns, but many male and female adolescents of other racial/ethnic groups had different patterns. Adolescents' math motivational belief patterns were associated with their Grade 11 math achievement and behavioral engagement even after controlling for prior math achievement and family socioeconomic status, and the associated varied by the gender and racial/ethnic groups.

Two experiments compared the effects of learning by drawing to studying instructor-provided visuals on learning outcomes, learning time, and cognitive load. College students studied a text on the human circulatory system and completed comprehension and transfer tests. In Experiment 1 (N = 107), students studied the text with provided visuals (provided visuals) or generated their own drawings from the text with text-based support (verballysupported drawing) or without support (unsupported drawing). Results showed that while the verballysupported drawing condition spent significantly more time and experienced significantly higher cognitive load than the provided visuals condition, there were no differences across the three conditions in learning outcomes. In Experiment 2 (N = 85), students studied the text with provided visuals (provided visuals) or generated drawings from the text with provided visuals as feedback (visually-supported drawing). Results showed that the visually-supported drawing condition spent significantly more time and experienced significantly higher cognitive load than the provided visuals condition but also performed significantly better than the provided visuals condition on the comprehension test. These findings suggest generating drawings prior to studying provided visuals is worth the time and effort.

Despite the well-documented negative implications of math anxiety on math learning, a scarcity of theoryguided, long-term longitudinal research limits knowledge about how math anxiety develops over time. Guided by the Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions (Pekrun, 2006), the present study addresses this gap by examining (1) how math anxiety develops in tandem with the development of control and value appraisals across secondary schooling, and (2) how these three constructs co-develop in relation to characteristics of home and school contexts. We used growth mixture modeling to investigate how math anxiety, math self-concept (a frequently examined indicator of control appraisal), and math utility value (one dimension of math value) develop in parallel in a sample of 3116 adolescents, who were assessed annually across middle and high school. We identified three trajectory classes: a stable class, characterized by stably modest math anxiety, high math selfconcept, and high math utility value, a linear change class, characterized by increasing math anxiety and decreasing math self-concept and utility value, and a fluctuating class, characterized by curvilinear changes in math anxiety, math self-concept, and math utility value. Parental academic support and teacher bias differentiated the stable class from the fluctuating class at the transition to middle school, and from the linear change class at the transition to high school. Our findings point to the heterogeneous contributions of control and value appraisals towards the development of math anxiety and highlight the importance of investigating multiple dimensions of the socio-ecological context at different stages of math anxiety development.

Acquiring the counterintuitive logic of how the mechanism of natural selection (NS) leads to the evolution of new species (speciation) represents a paradigm case of conceptual change. Given this, we examined children's intuitive preconceptions about speciation and their ability to construct, generalize, and retain an accurate understanding of the theory. We did so by conducting two multi-age, multi-session, and multi-measure intervention studies that assessed children's understanding of natural selection 4 times over three months using extended interviews. We also examined the role of Executive Function skills (EF) in these conceptual change processes. Distinctively, we explored whether-consistent with conceptual co-existence accounts-EF not only supports children's initial construction of a counterintuitive theory but also plays an ongoing role in the online reasoning of successful learners. Across two studies, North American children in Grades 2 (N = 34) and 3 (N = 34) were provided with coherent mechanistic explanations of NS through a two-storybook intervention sequence. The first storybook described the logic of NS to explain how a specialized body part evolved within a fictional species (adaptation). The second storybook extended the logic to explain how this same species evolved into a new, distinct species (speciation). Findings revealed that many second and third graders were able to learn and generalize the logic of speciation. This is a remarkable feat given that speciation conflicts with early developing essentialist and teleological intuitions, and defeats most adults. Our analyses also confirmed that constructing this counterintuitive theory draws heavily on children's EF capacities. They additionally reveal that once the theory is constructed, EF plays a continuing role in reasoning by inhibiting competing intuitive explanations that co-exist rather than being replaced during the process of conceptual change.

Growth mindset interventions foster students' beliefs that their abilities can grow through effort and appropriate strategies. However, not every student benefits from such interventions - yet research identifying which student factors support growth mindset interventions is sparse. In this study, we utilized machine learning methods to predict growth mindset effectiveness in a nationwide experiment in the U.S. with over 10,000 students. These methods enable analysis of arbitrarily-complex interactions between combinations of student-level predictor variables and intervention outcome, defined as the improvement in grade point average (GPA) during the transition to high school. We utilized two separate machine learning models: one to control for complex relationships between 51 student-level predictors and GPA, and one to predict the change in GPA due to the intervention. We analyzed the trained models to discover which features influenced model predictions most, finding that prior academic achievement, blocked navigations (attempting to navigate through the intervention software too quickly), self-reported reasons for learning, and race/ethnicity were the most important predictors in the model for predicting intervention effectiveness. As in previous research, we found that the intervention was most effective for students with prior low academic achievement. Unique to this study, we found that blocked navigations predicted an intervention effect as low as 0.185 GPA points (on a 0-4 scale) less than the mean. This was a notable negative prediction given that the mean intervention effect in our sample was just 0.026 GPA points, though few students (4.4%) experienced a substantial number of blocked navigation events. We also found that some minoritized students were predicted to benefit less (or even not at all) from the intervention. Our findings have implications for the design of computer-administered growth mindset interventions, especially in relation to students who experience procedural difficulties completing the intervention.

We demonstrate how motivational and behavioral processes can explain which students may be more likely to select into online (OL) than face-to-face (F2F) courses and also less likely to perform well in OL courses. Uni-versity students (n = 999) reported their reasons for OL course selection: university constraints, specific need for flexibility, general preference for flexibility, and learning preferences. Compared to F2F students, only OL stu-dents with certain self-selection reasons showed differences in motivation, behavior, and performance. Notably, OL students who said they had a specific need for flexibility created by the costs of competing responsibilities spent more time on non-academic activities (e.g., working, commuting), less time on academic activities (e.g., study groups), and ultimately performed worse when compared to F2F peers. These students were especially likely to be women, older, and part-time. We discuss implications for practice and for using demographic characteristics to control for selection effects.

Research on children's categorization presents seemingly paradoxical results: Presenting exemplars at the same time (simultaneously) and presenting exemplars apart in time (spaced) have both been argued to support learning. This research was designed to explain these results by examining the visual attention and forgetting dynamics underlying various presentation schedules. Across three experiments, preschool-aged children (N = 292) were presented with science category exemplars on simultaneous, massed, and spaced schedules. The first experiment revealed that children had the strongest generalization performance in the spaced condition at the delayed post-test. In subsequent experiments, children visually attended less and forgot more during spaced learning. These results are discussed in the context of several theoretical accounts in cognitive science and applied implications for science education. © 2021 Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition