Mindset shmineshet etc...!

Are people still boosting Growth Mindset? In my experience, people don't like it when you point out that, to the extent that this notion is useful and true, it is obvious, and otherwise it is largely just marketing.

I was aware of it well before lots of people in math because my wife is in education and she got excited and introduced me to it. I told her what I really thought about it, but that didn't stop her from wanting to attend a couple of seminars from the cottage industry of acolytes spreading the gospel. One time, I had to drive out to Oak Park IL for one these events. I went to get custard at a custard shop on Oak Park Ave. that my father would take us to when we were kids so the trip was not entirely wasted.  They would dip the custard in chocolate which would then freeze. It was yummy.

In 2014 lots of math faculty were talking about a new program that showed promise to help underrepresented students at UT Austin

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-graduate.html

I read the article and initially just gave my glib assessment that it sounded like warmed over Treisman along with a dose of growth mindset to me.

I also said that it does sound like they have spent the money to do this correctly, but we shouldn't really be surprised that students do better when they have lots of academic support and a sense of community is created, and I am skeptical that positive messages play a significant measurable role. My other advice was that we should not attempt to emulate it since I did not believe we would spend the money  on it to do it properly, but in the meantime, let's see if these results are consistent 5 years from now since these sorts of programs often suffer when the charismatic founder leaves. It's hard to institutionalize the "mojo". I never followed up in 2019 since I had given up higher ed by then.

There was one paragraph which really irritated me in this article:

"Perhaps the most striking fact about the success programs is that the selection criteria are never disclosed to students. “From a numbers perspective, the students in these programs are all in the bottom quartile,” Laude explained. “But here’s the key — none of them know that they’re in the bottom quartile.” The first rule of the Dashboard, in other words, is that you never talk about the Dashboard. Laude says he assumes that most U.L.N. students understand on some level that they were chosen in part because of their financial need, but he says it is important for the university to play down that fact when dealing directly with students. It is an extension of the basic psychological strategy that he has used ever since that first TIP program: Select the students who are least likely to do well, but in all your communications with them, convey the idea that you have selected them for this special program not because you fear they will fail, but because you are confident they can succeed"

I'M SORRY, BUT DO YOU THINK WE ARE IDIOTS?

This really struck me as delusional. We, black, brown, and poor students, look around and figure out very quickly why we are in such programs.  It's usually pretty obvious.

I actually believe such programs when done properly, like it sounds like was done at UT Austin at the time, can actually increase retention and graduation rates, and even increase the number of students graduating in a given STEM major and that is a good thing.

But the acid test that I always ask myself is how many students gained admission to and thrived in a competitive STEM graduate program?

I have tried to obtain this data and was not able to. In fact, in my experience, people don't like it when you ask for this data. My assumption is that if the results were great they would be screaming them from the rooftops or at least put them on a publicly available webpage.

We can contrast this sort of last minute, already in college, program with what more affluent, usually white and Asian kids have access to throughout grammar school and high school: Math Circle programs, Young Scholars programs, and even more specialized programs like the Ross program. All of these programs are in addition to top notch schooling along with lots of opportunities for academic competitions and the training that goes with them.

This is the reason my final suggestion to the department in response to this article was that we should be doing high school outreach -- which I have been saying for about 40 years. I ended my email to the department with the following sentence:

“...you get talented black and Latino kids the same way you get talented white and Asian kids: good teachers spending a lot of time on them over the course of many years. Common sense.”