what I mean by that is if you joined us for our very first Journal Club episode for The A&P Professor, you may recall that we said that we’re going to do this every couple of months and that was only a few weeks ago that we did that. So we’re like coming in way early with another Journal Club and why are we doing that? That’s really a good question. That’s kind of the central question of today’s episode to join us as usual with our Journal Club, is our Journal Club Director, Krista Rompolski. Krista. Hello. And why are we here?

Krista Rompolski:
Hi, Kevin, nice to be back. Like you said, sooner than we expected. We are here, because an article that I suggested to you months ago has become a bit more relevant with the events of the world in the past few weeks than I had expected or anticipated. So I suggested that maybe the best thing we can do is move this one way up on the docket rather than doing it before the start of the fall semester and just talk about what this could mean for us as educators, as well as our students.

Krista Rompolski:
So the article and I shared this with HAPS members, but I know that we’re not all HAPS members in the listening audience. The article is called STEM Faculty Who Believe Ability is Fixed, Have Larger Racial Achievement Gaps and Inspire Less Student Motivation in Their Classes, a cross sectional study. This study was done in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. It was published last February, 2019. So there is a likelihood that a number of listeners may have seen it, but for those that haven’t, I think it is an absolute must read for any professor, particularly a professor in the sciences.

Kevin Patton:
When you first brought this, you were going through a variety of different possible topics or papers to look at in our Journal Club and this is way before the most recent events in the news occurred. You had winnowed it down and kind of asked my opinion on your short list and, they’re all good articles. But when I read this one and I remember having that discussion a number of weeks ago, when I saw this one I said, wow, this is something, as you said, we all need to be looking at. Boy, it was hard to figure out which paper should go first and which goes second and so on. Maybe it’s a good idea that we held it back a little bit because now it was there for us to bring it in when the timing couldn’t be better to consider these ideas.

Kevin Patton:
There’s more to discuss and we’ll be right back after this brief message.

Sponsored by AAA

Kevin Patton:
A searchable transcript, and a captioned audiogram of this episode are funded by AAA the American Association for Anatomy. AAA always has something going on. And one way to find out what’s new and happening in AAA is to go to their newly redesigned website at anatomy.org.

Fixed & Growth Mindsets

Kevin Patton:
Okay, we’re talking about, wow, this is a great paper in very general terms and the title kind of implies what it’s about, but tell us a little bit more about what they did and what they found in the article.

Krista Rompolski:
Sure. So I have my typical writeup, but I’ll kind of do it a little bit more off the cuff then my more formal recording like we did last time. So essentially I’ll just read a bit from the introduction that despite decades of research and millions of dollars in federal funding aimed to understand and ameliorate under representation of diverse individuals in STEM, racial and ethnic minorities referred to in this article, as URMs continue to underperform academically relative to their white peers.

Krista Rompolski:
In this paper, they lump white and Asian students together as the not underrepresented minorities. I’m sure we could have a conversation about that, but just statistically speaking in terms of performance academically, that’s how they classified it. They acknowledged that there could be multiple factors here with achievement gaps, but they may be exacerbated by subtle situational cues from their STEM professors that, reinforce racial stereotype, which is known as the cues hypothesis.

Krista Rompolski:
They looked at a really novel situational cue. The belief that college professors in STEM either have a fixed or malleable mindset about student ability. So essentially whether they believe that student ability is changeable, whether it can grow, having a growth mindset, versus if intelligence and ability are fixed. How potentially professors interact with their students, the subtle or less subtle potentially cues they send to students in their classrooms about that. What they’re essentially found was that there’s much larger gaps in achievement between professors that have a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset, for all students. But then that gap widens substantially between white students and underrepresented minority students in professors that have a fixed mindset.

Krista Rompolski:
That’s kind of like the quick findings, there’s obviously a lot more in terms of things they tried to tease out such as, okay is there a difference in whether the professor is themselves an underrepresented minority or not. Whether they’re a male or female or not. Whether they’ve been teaching 30 years or three years or not. Consistently none of those things changed at least the statistical findings.

Krista Rompolski:
So no matter what the professor’s particular demographic or experience level, consistently it was mindset that was predicting the GPA and performance differences between students. So that really rocked me because as I kept reading the article and looking at the things they controlled for or analyzed, I was like, well, it’s going to be age because maybe older professors don’t view themselves as needing to attend to how to learn the subject versus just the subject itself, which is something we talked about in the last podcast. Or maybe it was more male professors, no offense, Kevin, I think [crosstalk 00:09:08]-

Kevin Patton:
You’re going to tick them all off here. Older, male …

Krista Rompolski:
But I kept thinking, well, something is going to pop up to explain this more than just … or at least explain who has the fixed mindset. Then what really surprised me and maybe it shouldn’t, but even the black and Hispanic professors still had the same results in their classrooms. I was just left thinking, my goodness, what am I doing or not doing? What are all of us may be doing or not doing to send messages that can substantially impact, not only someone’s performance in a class, but whether they continue on, in a major and especially in A&P it gets labeled a weeder or gateway course so often and we’ve all known the stats nationally on A&Ps success. I think while we can maybe think this doesn’t apply to us, I think it applies to A&P professors tremendously. Especially given the history of lack of representation in anatomy and medicine in general, that we all know is very much there.

Krista Rompolski:
So yeah That’s the kind of the less formal, recorded summary of this paper. Obviously there’s a lot more to look at, some discussions about what, how they measured mindset, how they did all of their statistical analyses. Then of course, author suggestions or discussion about why these results are that the way that they are and what we can do to change it. So, everyone should read this paper, that’s listening, everyone should take it and consider what they are or aren’t doing in their classrooms that could potentially be changed in this as a result of reading this for the sake of their students.

Kevin Patton:
Yeah. I want to circle back to a few of the things that you mentioned that are in the paper and talk about them a little bit. But before I do that, I want to mention another aspect of the context in which we’re talking about this in this particular episode. Krista and I were uncertain today, whether we should record this or not, because we have two white professors talking about education of underrepresented minorities. Should we include some panelists that are from underrepresented minorities, either students or professors, or both, and expand the conversation. I think that would be a valuable conversation to have, and it’s important. What happened was, as we were discussing whether we should record anything now or expand our panel or not, we found ourselves having the discussion. So we decided, well, let’s just go ahead and record it and have this discussion because it is important, I think, for white people and people of color to have this conversation with each other.

Kevin Patton:
But I think it’s important for all of us under any number of circumstances to have these conversations. So I’m not going to wait until we have someone of color to talk about this. I want to talk about it now. Then I want to talk about it again with people who may have experienced this as a student and have made it, have become successful in a STEM field and what was their experience and what can I do better as Kevin, but also as a white professor and an older male white professor. You brought that up and Krista that wasn’t your idea. I mean, that was talked about in the paper. They talked about this concept that we often have, and I agree that it’s out there, that older white man seemed to be the gatekeepers of the STEM fields. I don’t think it’s seen. I think we have been, and I don’t think that that’s good for anybody and it’s not good for society. That’s kind of the context in which we’re talking about this whole thing, right?

Kevin Patton:
Is this idea that what can we do? As an older white male who recognizes this problem, whenever I’m confronted with it, I think to myself, I don’t like that. I don’t want to be part of that problem. I don’t think I am, but maybe I am. Maybe I am part of that problem. So how can I change that? How can I as an individual, old white male professor, how can I change that? What can I do that actually has an impact? Now we know that there are social things that we can all do to engage in that overall conversation. But what can I do in my seat as an A&P professor? What can I do there?

Kevin Patton:
I think one of the things I can do is to make sure that all of my students, whether they have certain advantages or not certain advantages, whatever their mindset is as a student, that I do the best that I can help them. This paper, I think is a breakthrough paper. This is a paper that tells us exactly what we can do. So circling back to what some of the content was … Oh, and by the way, before I move on, I just want to say that given the fact that we realized that this needs to be an ongoing and broader conversation, I invite people to call into the podcast hotline, contact Krista or me directly, email us, whatever and we can continue this conversation in future episodes. We want to continue this conversation. I think it’s an important one, but for now this is the conversation we’re having and it’s about this research.

Kevin Patton:
So circling back, one of the things that Krista, that you brought up, that I want to kind of get back to is this multiple layers of research. Every single time when I read this paper, I would have a question like, yeah, but what about and the next paragraph they would say, well, yeah, what about, they would address it. My jaw was dropping because I was seeing that a lot of people feel like, it’s the older professors who might have more of an issue with this fixed mindset issue than the younger professors. But now that I’m an older professor, my prejudice is I see it more in younger professors when I talk to them. So I have the opposite prejudice. Yet we see that, yeah anybody can have these fixed mindsets, whether you’re young or old, whether you’re white or not, whether you’re male or female, whether you’re experienced in teaching, not as experienced in teaching. They went through and they knocked down each one of those possible confounding factors.

Krista Rompolski:
It’s also important to highlight the fact that, well, I didn’t have this in my first summary they did look at the course evaluations from students that were in all of these classes and bear in mind in the results from these, the students didn’t know that this larger study about mindset belief was going on. So, they didn’t know that they were potentially rating or evaluating a course taught by a professor with one mindset or another.

Krista Rompolski:
But just some quick notes, the authors examined four semesters of student average course evaluation for the faculty who responded to the survey to try to shed light a little bit more on the student experiences in those courses. They reported the consistent with the theory that mindset belief is associated with motivation, students reported much less motivation to do their best work in classes taught by faculty who endorsed fixed mindset beliefs. They said that those professors were less likely to emphasize learning and development, which makes sense and they were less likely to recommend the course and the instructor. But I think the most interesting part of that is that the students didn’t report any differences in the time commitment or difficulty or demand of the course, which basically suggests that that is not a factor that predicts student satisfaction. So we can’t say, oh, we get bad course evaluations because we asked them to work really hard. Students want to work hard. They just want that the work that they put in to line up with the results, which who doesn’t in any aspect of our lives. That could apply sort of outside this paper or the topic. I think that’s an interesting finding that it’s not that students just want easy classes or that they just write good course evaluations for easy classes or non demanding classes.

Krista Rompolski:
So I thought that was an especially interesting thing to add into that. So it all adds up and it’s seemingly something that seems so obvious, but then how do you endorse a … can you change your mindset, belief? How do we change mindset beliefs? If they’re identified. Who wants to admit that they have a fixed mindset belief and what do we do about it? But I think what’s so important or that the bigger takeaway from this paper is that if that’s something that is easily fixed, look at the impact it could have. Because of all the other factors that didn’t predict the findings, at least in this paper, just that mindset belief.

Krista Rompolski:
So we should be targeting and throwing so many more resources at mindset belief in professors. That’s on us and I think that that’s something that can be relatively easily done with some workshops or some readings or some part of required training before you come onto campus and start interacting with students. Since we get basically no education training whatsoever. Just the expertise in our field. I know that that’s changing, but I think that wasn’t something … this is the first time, I believe, I was ever exposed to this term fixed and growth mindset. So I think I’ve got a very growth mindset with my students and with other people in my life, but it really still made me sit back and think hard and painfully about what I’ve missed over the years and what I could’ve done better.

Kevin Patton:
We’ll be right back in a moment.

Sponsored by HAPI

Kevin Patton:
The free distribution of this podcast is sponsored by the Master of Science in Human Anatomy & Physiology Instruction. The HAPI degree. This is an online program for A&P faculty who already have an advanced degree to review all the major concepts of A&P and brush up on current teaching practice. Including skills helpful for pandemic teaching. If you’re listening to this before June 25th, there’s a virtual open house for the HAPI program on that date at 8:00 PM Eastern time. You can go to theAPprofessor.org/openhapi. That’s open, H-A-P-I, to register, and you can check out details about the HAPI program anytime at nycc.edu/hapi or click the link in the show notes or episode page. There’s a new cohort forming right now, so yeah, now’s a good time to be taking that step forward in your professional development.

Applying Mindsets to Teaching

Kevin Patton:
Something that I noticed in this article that seemed like kind of a, not really offhanded remark, but it didn’t really pop out it was almost an aside and that was, they said it would take almost no extra money or effort to do some training of all faculty in this idea. I mean, just reading this paper, I think can do a lot just to expose the issue and make people aware of it. Then I think that it really doesn’t take a lot for people to understand, what their on mindset is, where they are on that spectrum. I’m sure it is a spectrum and not black and white, but they’re on the spectrum, where on the spectrum are they and now they can see the value of changing their position on the spectrum and they can think about, well, what can I do to change that?

Kevin Patton:
In a training session, they can be exposed to some ways of self identifying those behaviors as they happen and catch themselves with those filters that they have and recognizing what the filters are and when they’re interpreting things through those filters or expressing things through those filters, how that can affect it. But, you mentioned the idea of, the fact that higher ed faculty, we’re not certified teachers like they are in K-12. So we don’t have that pre-training although as you mentioned, more and more people are coming in with that pre-training and I think more and more faculty, once they’re there realized they need the training and they’re getting that on their own in a variety of ways, both formally and informally.

Kevin Patton:
On this podcast, I’ve mentioned before the HAPI Program, which is a master’s degree in anatomy and physiology instruction. There are some other formal degrees, but the reason I mention it is because this is a discussion that we always have in my course and like you, I don’t think of it in terms of this terminology. This terminology was new to me. I mean, I’ve used the term mindset before, but not in this context. I didn’t think of fixed mindset or growth mindset, but the concept itself, even though we didn’t call it, that comes up a lot in our course. There’s one discussion in particular where it touches on that. It’s a discussion where I give them some examples of things that we can do as A&P professors to help students learn how to learn, to expose them to the idea of metacognition and how that can help.

Kevin Patton:
What some different strategies are for studying and so on. I didn’t get much of that as an undergraduate. I mean, I did get some of it when I went to my professor’s office and said, I’m having a hard time with this course, or I’m having a hard time in college or whatever, which I did. I really struggled my first year. I got help that way, but nobody suggested that I get that help. It wasn’t part of the course and it wasn’t ever mentioned in class. So I kind of bring up the idea of, should we mention it in class? Is our role as an A&P teacher to teach students how to learn and how to study and how to be successful. So I throw that out there and the discussion ensues, and you can see this, what I can now call, because I’ve read this paper growth mindset and fixed mindset. You can see that spectrum reveal itself.

Kevin Patton:
Then we discuss and we go back and forth and point out different things. It usually, and this is something I discovered about discussions as a learning tool because I always thought what good is discussing? I mean, maybe in the sociology class, but in something like A&P, what good is it to discuss? In this discussion, we arrive at a place where people have moved closer to that growth mindset. They might not be all the way at the other end yet, but they’ve moved toward that just by talking it out. So it could be that somebody listening to this episode, may, just by listening to this conversation and thinking it through might move a little bit on that spectrum toward the growth mindset.

Kevin Patton:
Then if they follow up and read the paper, I’m sure they’re going to move a little bit. Then if they bring that to their peers and start discussing it, it’s going to move a little bit more and they’re going to get other people to get it to move. So hopefully it can really spread. But I just want to emphasize the point that maybe it’s just discussions that can get us started and get us partly moved along that spectrum.

Krista Rompolski:
Yeah. I agree with everything you’ve said. I think that at least from my own experience, this all hinges on people wanting to have that discussion and being open to change because it is scary. I think whether it’s just talking about how you structure your class and communicate with your students versus your larger beliefs and attitudes and actions in the world. But if you feel overwhelmed by change, sometimes the reaction is to sort of dig deeper in your position versus open yourself up and I’ll kind of just leave it at that.

Krista Rompolski:
But they said in the paper as a reason for sort of why does this fixed mindset potentially have so much harm or influence, is that it’s likely to shape the way you structure your course, how you communicate with your students or how you encourage or discourage persistence. You could do those things. You can encourage and student persistence and communicate better without having to change a single lecture PowerPoint. Like it isn’t this potentially massive overhaul. I mean maybe if the more you change the better the results, but you can start with really subtle things.

Krista Rompolski:
I mean, I kind of always think back to, this has nothing to do with this, but how like one sentence or one moment can just totally sort of either make or break someone. I always go back to, I forget what year it was, but when Howard Dean was running for president and he made that goofy and it was like his campaign was over or something like that. So I think as a professor, I could in one sentence in one class drastically change the tone for better or worse in my class. I think that’s the idea that it’s trying to get across. That we make, whether we want to acknowledge this or want this to be the case or not?

Krista Rompolski:
I think we have to acknowledge that we make such a bigger impact on our students’ life, their whole trajectory, than we think. Especially in these classes that are foundational and so often labeled that gateway or weeder course. Which I struggle tremendously with when I hear that, because, why were they allowed into the college then if we expect that we’re going to have a certain amount of melt. I think it’s changing the phrase that some students, rather than saying, some students will fail and we expect that, then to just, some students may fail. I realized that that’s one word, but just reflect on that for a second. That’s so subtle. We acknowledge that, yes, definitely there may be some students that don’t pass the class, but saying will, is a fixed mindset example that we expect and that’s necessary. I mean, that’s terminology, I’ve heard throughout my entire teaching career from the administration or other professors and things like that. It just feels so unfair because if we know that why are we setting them up for that from coming in.

Krista Rompolski:
I realize that college is a business that has to stay open and depends upon tuition, but, it is clearly in this paper and so many other things you are, you know, we’re especially hearing about now more than ever, it is disproportionately affecting underrepresented minorities. We have to change this. We just have to do something about this now more than ever,

Kevin Patton:
Well, I can’t agree more Krista and I really appreciate you bringing this paper to my attention and to the attention of all of our listeners, we could go on and on talking about these things, I really, join Krista in strongly recommending that you read this paper, share it with your colleagues and so on. There’s a lot more in this paper than we had time to discuss, in this episode. For example, Krista just gave an example of a way that we live out a fixed mindset. There are many examples in here of things that are examples of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. So if you’re a little bit unclear still as to what that means, exactly, read the paper. Then look through some of the citations that they make here and that gives even more information about what they’re talking about here.

Kevin Patton:
But this is what I hope is the beginning of a long conversation in the anatomy and physiology teaching community. Again, I encourage everybody to call in, write in, whatever, so that we can continue this conversation in this podcast, as well as in the broader A&P teaching community.

Kevin Patton:
So Krista, thanks again for a wonderful Journal Club episode. We’re looking forward to your next paper. Boy, this is going to be a hard one to beat, but I know you’ve got some really good ones on your short list and you’re adding more all the time. So thanks again for hosting the Journal Club for us.

Krista Rompolski:
I just want to thank the Dean of where I work Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. Her name is Dr. Diane Husic. She shared this prior to a faculty meeting in October with all of us and felt so compelled to share this and many other similar resources about mindset beliefs, and tried very hard to have a faculty wide conversation about these topics at one of our faculty meetings. I consistently thank her because I don’t think any paper has ever made a bigger impact on me, both as a professor and just as an individual moving around in the world. So, I told her I was going to try to cover this paper on a podcast and I just want to acknowledge her efforts and how proud I am to be part of the college that I am. That our leadership from the top down is trying to start these conversations. So thanks Diane, if you happen to have time to listen in the middle of all the fall pandemic planning,

Sponsored by HAPS

Kevin Patton:
Marketing support for this podcast is provided by HAPS the Human Anatomy & Physiology Society promoting excellence in the teaching of human anatomy and physiology for over 30 years, go visit HAPS at theAPprofessor.org/HAPS. That’s H-A-P-S.

Kevin Patton:
Hey, if you’re on Facebook, you may want to check out the new Facebook group for HAPS. You know, next time you’re wandering about aimlessly on your Facebook feed.

Book Club: Mindset

Kevin Patton:
Well, it’s time for my appointment at the corner bookstore and I’m here to pick up a book that I ordered recently. After reading this study, that Krista Rompolski and I discussed in this episode, I became curious about the concept of mindset. In particular, how mindset affects learning and by extension, how mindset affects teaching. So I went back to the source, a book called Mindset, The New Psychology of Success. This book first came out in 2006 and became a huge bestseller.

Kevin Patton:
Where was I? I completely missed it. Well, there wasn’t a book club for A&P faculty back then. So yeah, that’s probably how I missed it. But anyway, the mindset book is now available in an updated version. And that’s what I’ve ordered from my bookstore. After decades of research and motivation, renowned Stanford psychologist, Carol S. Dweck, discovered a simple, but groundbreaking idea, the power of mindset. In her book, she shows how success in school work sports and the arts, and almost really every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities.

Kevin Patton:
People with a fixed mindset, those who believe that abilities are fixed are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset. Those who believe that abilities can be developed. The mindset book reveals how great teachers and other coaches and leaders can put this idea to use, to foster outstanding accomplishment in our students.

Kevin Patton:
In the updated edition Dweck offers new insights into her now famous and broadly embraced concept. She introduces a phenomenon, she calls false growth mindset and guides people toward adopting a deeper, truer growth mindset. She also expands the mindset concept beyond the individual, applying it to the cultures of groups and organizations, and even courses and classrooms. With the right mindset you can motivate your students to transform their lives and your own.

Kevin Patton:
I’m going to try this out. This sounds great and so that’s why I’m adding it to The A&P Professor book club. Now in our Journal Club discussion Krista and I kind of left that hanging about what steps we A&P faculty can take in tackling the issue of our mindsets’ impact on achievement and our students, particularly among underrepresented minorities. This is where I’m going to start. Why not join me?

Staying Connected

Kevin Patton:
Don’t forget that there are links to the study that Krista brought to us in this Journal Club episode in the show notes and episode page at theAPprofessor.org/71. As well as links to the book club recommendation and links to our sponsors. You know that you’re always encouraged to call in with your questions, comments, and ideas, right? But as we said earlier in this episode, we want to extend this conversation. Why not call us with your comments and questions at the podcast online at 1-833-LION-DEN, that’s +1 833-546-6336, or send a recording or written message to podcast@theAPprofessor.org. If you want to come on the podcast or want to suggest a guest, let us know that too. I’ll see you down the road.

Aileen:
The A&P Professor is hosted by Dr. Kevin Patton, an award-winning professor and textbook author in human anatomy and physiology.

Kevin Patton:
This podcast is for professional use only.