Changing Students’ Beliefs About Learning Can Unveil Their Potential

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-91
Author(s):  
Paul A. O’Keefe ◽  
Hae Yeon Lee ◽  
Patricia Chen
Keyword(s):  
Student Motivation ◽  
Cognitive Factors ◽  
Psychological Interventions ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Maladaptive Beliefs ◽  
Beliefs About Learning

Too often, students fall short of their potential. Although structural and cognitive factors can contribute to this underperformance, how students subjectively construe themselves and their educational contexts can also play significant roles. Social-psychological interventions can increase student motivation, resilience, and achievement by altering these construals. To provide general recommendations for their implementation, we focus on interventions that address common student concerns, which stem from maladaptive beliefs that (a) intelligence cannot be improved; (b) some academic topics are uninteresting and personally irrelevant; (c) learning is an unplanned, passive activity; and (d) others think that “people like me” do not have the potential for success. These interventions tend to be relatively brief, easily implemented, highly scalable, and low in cost, time, and labor. Through a partnership of psychological scientists and practitioners, these carefully contextualized, theory-driven interventions can help students achieve their potential.

“If you want to understand something, try to change it”: Social-psychological interventions to cultivate resilience

2015 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eddie Brummelman ◽  
Gregory M. Walton
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Positive Change ◽  
Psychological Interventions ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Resilience Mechanisms ◽  
Exciting Development ◽  
Unique Potential

AbstractWe argue that social psychology has unique potential for advancing understanding of resilience. An exciting development that illustrates this is the emergence of social-psychological interventions – brief, stealthy, and psychologically precise interventions – that can yield broad and lasting benefits by targeting key resilience mechanisms. Such interventions provide a causal test of resilience mechanisms and bring about positive change in people's lives.

scholarly journals Theoretical, Ethical, and Policy Considerations for Conducting Social-Psychological Interventions to Close Educational Achievement Gaps

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin R Binning ◽  
Alexander S. Browman
Keyword(s):  
Educational Achievement ◽  
Achievement Gaps ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Psychological Interventions ◽  
Zone Model ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Underperforming Students ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Threat Levels

Social–psychological interventions in education have shown remarkable promise as brief, inexpensive, and powerful methods for improving educational equity and inclusion by helping underperforming students realize their potential. These findings have led to intensive study and replication attempts to understand and close achievement gaps at scale. In the present review, we identify several significant issues this work has raised that bear on the theoretical, ethical, and policy implications of using these interventions to close achievement gaps. Using both classic and contemporary models of threat and performance, we propose a Zone Model of Threat to predict when social–psychological interventions in education may yield positive, null, and negative effects for specific students. From this analysis, we argue from an ethical standpoint that to reduce backfire effects, interventions should be focused on optimizing the salience of psychological threat across students rather than on uniformly reducing it. As a long-term policy goal, intervention studies should follow a two-step process, in which students’ individual levels of threat are first diagnosed and then interventions are tailored to the students based on their threat levels. Practical and theoretical implications of the proposed framework are discussed.

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