Education Week - May 2, 2018 - 8

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > TRACKING NEWS AND IDEAS IN EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
www.digitaldirections.org

Pearson Tests Growth-Mindset Messages in Software
By Benjamin Herold
New York

Education-publishing giant Pearson
recently tested "social-psychological"
messages in learning software used
by more than 9,000 unwitting students at 165 U.S. colleges and universities, highlighting the emerging
hopes and fears about the ways the
ed-tech industry might seek to capitalize on recent research into the impact of students' mindsets on their
learning, including in K-12.
The study, "Embedding ResearchInspired Innovations in EdTech: An
RCT of Social-Psychological Interventions, at Scale," was presented last
month at the annual conference of
the American Educational Research
Association.
The release of the research
prompted a fierce debate over issues
of ethics, privacy, and consent during
large-scale testing of such strategies
using commercial software programs.
Pearson's stock fell noticeably in response related to concerns, which the
company described as unwarranted.
"Recent media coverage has mischaracterized this relatively minor
product update by extracting technical language from the research that,
when taken out of context, and paired
with words like 'experiment,' conveys
a malicious intent," said Scott Overland, Pearson's director of media relations, in a statement.
Through its study, Pearson sought
to determine whether encouraging a
"growth mindset" and grounding students' expectations of how much effort
a task might require would lead them
to attempt and complete more problems. The test took place in a popular
commercial-software program called
MyLab Programming, often used for
college-level introductory computerprogramming courses.
Pearson embedded the messaging
into some versions of the software,
then randomly assigned different colleges to use different versions of the
program. The company did not seek
prior consent from participating institutions or individuals.
The results included some modest
signs that growth-mindset messaging can increase students' persistence
when they start a problem, then run
into difficulty. That's likely to bolster
proponents of the idea, who say it's important to encourage students to view
intelligence as something that can
change with practice and hard work.
But students who received both
types of social-psychological messages
tested by Pearson attempted fewer
problems than their peers, running
counter to the researchers' expectations.
'Outside experts offered skeptical
reactions, on a number of fronts.
"It does not surprise me at all that
corporations are attempting to monetize a promising way of thinking
about a hairy problem," said Phi Delta
Kappan CEO Joshua Starr, who was
a major proponent of social-emotional
learning during his time as superintendent of the Montgomery County,

Md., school district and who currently serves on the Aspen Institute's
National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development.
"There is some value" to Pearson's
approach, Starr said, but "socialemotional learning is best promoted
through strong communities and relationships," not software.
And Ben Williamson, a lecturer
at the University of Stirling in the
United Kingdom who studies big data
in education, raised other concerns.
There's little evidence that focusing
on growth mindset in the classroom
will significantly benefit students,
Williamson argued, citing recent
analyses finding limited effects of
mindset-based interventions in K-12
classrooms.
In addition, Williamson maintained, companies such as Pearson
would be wise to pay close attention
to the growing public anxiety over the
ways companies collect people's sensitive information and use it for psychological profiling and targeting.
"It's concerning that forms of lowlevel psychological experimentation
to trigger certain behaviors appears
to be happening in the ed-tech sector,
and students might not know those
experiments are taking place," Williamson said.
In an interview, Kristen DiCerbo,
Pearson's vice president for learning research and design, described
the experiment as part of the company's "product-improvement process"-an early test to see if new
mindset-messaging features actually work, before they are rolled out
comprehensively.
Utilizing commercial software allowed Pearson to see how the changes
played out for real students and actual classrooms, DiCerbo said, generating more useful information than
had it taken place in a lab-or if the
company had rolled out new messaging without systematically studying
its impact at all.
Pearson also noted that the study
did not involve the collection of any
personally identifiable information
on individual students and that federal guidelines don't require consent
for research involving "normal educational practice."
"We think these motivational aspects are really important for students' learning outcomes," DiCerbo
said.
"But the only way we're going to
know for sure is to do the research."

"

It's concerning that
forms of low-level
psychological
experimentation to
trigger certain
behaviors appears to
be happening in the
ed-tech sector, and
students might not
know those
experiments are
taking place."
BEN WILLIAMSON
Lecturer, University of Stirling, United
Kingdom

The idea was to see if students'
motivation and achievement would
be improved in either of two ways:
*Inserting "growth-mindset" messages (stressing the importance of
effort and building skills over time)
into the software's instructions and
into the feedback it offered to students who provided wrong answers.
An example: "No one is born a great
programmer. Success takes hours
and hours of practice."
* Using "anchoring of effort" messages (seeking to leverage a common
cognitive bias in which people tend to
rely on the first piece of information
they learn, even if it's irrelevant to
the problem they're trying to solve).
Pearson's theory was that students
might not have any sense of how
much effort is often required to solve
computer-programming problems,
so providing them with a high-end
estimate based on analysis of previous users' experience could ground
them in the expectation that multiple attempts would be necessary. An
example: "Some students tried this
question 26 times! Don't worry if it
takes you a few tries to get it right."
The researchers were surprised
to learn that students who didn't
receive any special messaging
from the software tried to solve
significantly more problems (212)
than those who received growthmindset messages (174) or anchoring messages (156).

That finding suggested that the
social-psychological interventions
they were testing backfired, although DiCerbo said other factors-
especially differences in how various instructors use the software in
their classes-may have also played
a role.

'Open Question'
But the Pearson team also found
that students who received the
growth-mindset messages successfully completed more of the problems they started than their counterparts. Those students were also
significantly more likely to eventually solve problems they initially
got incorrect, supporting the idea
that encouraging a growth mindset
can have positive benefits when students run into difficulty.
Big-picture, DiCerbo said, there's
still a lot of work to be done -and
Pearson, which is preparing to sell
its K-12 curriculum business, believes that more such tests may be
valuable.
"It's still an open question as to
whether technology is even capable
of providing this type of feedback,"
DiCerbo said.
Visit the DIGITAL EDUCATION blog,
which tracks news and trends on
this issue.
www.edweek.org/blogs

AN ED-TECH RESEARCHER'S TAKE
Sharp debates about privacy, consent, and ethics spilled
into public view following the release of a study in which
education publisher Pearson used commercial software to
test strategies for changing students' mindsets.
Among the questions raised:
l

l

l

Where is the line between product improvement and
clinical research?
When does something like promoting a "growth mindset"
or seeking to change students' attitudes become a
psychological experiment?
What kind of consent can and should be obtained before
testing "social-psychological interventions" in commercial
learning software?

Justin Reich, the executive director of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's Teaching Systems Lab, addresses
those questions on Education Week's EdTech Researcher blog.
"Every educational software company and publisher
will be modifying their products over time to try to
improve them," Reich writes. "I'd like to incentivize
them to do so in a way that the public benefits from
those companies sharing what they learn."
Read the full post at www.edweek.org/go/
edtechresearcher-response.
-BENJAMIN HEROLD

Mixed Results
Pearson's MyLab Programming
software is typically used for introductory computer-science courses
where students learn the programming languages C++ or Java.
DiCerbo said that made sense as
the first content area to test socialpsychological messaging, because
many students have a propensity to
attribute failure in programming to
a personal shortcoming, rather than
seeing it as a challenge and opportunity to learn.

8 | EDUCATION WEEK | May 2, 2018 | www.edweek.org

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Education Week - May 2, 2018

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