Some students struggle with chemistry because they don’t find the relevance between chemistry content and their lives or they perceive their intelligence as fixed. Social-psychological interventions, brief interventions that target students’ subjective experiences, were developed to address these two issues. This presentation describes the implementation and evaluation of two social-psychological interventions, a utility value intervention and a growth mindset intervention, given to students in second semester general chemistry. The utility value intervention is grounded in Eccles' expectancy-value model and the growth mindset intervention is grounded in Dweck’s description of growth versus fixed mindset. Students were randomly assigned to one of three groups with each group receiving a set of three writing tasks. Students were either asked to summarize chemistry topics (comparison group), to link chemistry topics to daily life or personal value (utility value group), or to read a paragraph describing growth mindset and write on their experiences with using a growth mindset (growth mindset group). The results show that students receiving the utility value intervention outperformed the comparison group, reaching with an average score 5% higher on the final two exams. The growth mindset intervention improved academic performance relative to the comparison group but not to the extent observed with the utility value intervention. Recommendations for enacting utility value interventions, both from the literature and from this research study, will also be presented.

Social-psychological interventions (growth mindset and utility value) to promote general chemistry students’ academic performance

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.