“Mistakes Help Us Grow”: Facilitating and Evaluating Growth Mindset Supportive Language in Classrooms

Kunal Handa, Margarett Clapper, Jessica Boyle, Rose Wang, Diyi Yang, David Yeager, Dorottya Demszky


Abstract
Teachers’ growth mindset supportive language (GMSL)—rhetoric emphasizing that one’s skills can be improved over time—has been shown to significantly reduce disparities in academic achievement and enhance students’ learning outcomes. Although teachers espouse growth mindset principles, most find it difficult to adopt GMSL in their practice due the lack of effective coaching in this area. We explore whether large language models (LLMs) can provide automated, personalized coaching to support teachers’ use of GMSL. We establish an effective coaching tool to reframe unsupportive utterances to GMSL by developing (i) a parallel dataset containing GMSL-trained teacher reframings of unsupportive statements with an accompanying annotation guide, (ii) a GMSL prompt framework to revise teachers’ unsupportive language, and (iii) an evaluation framework grounded in psychological theory for evaluating GMSL with the help of students and teachers. We conduct a large-scale evaluation involving 174 teachers and 1,006 students, finding that both teachers and students perceive GMSL-trained teacher and model reframings as more effective in fostering a growth mindset and promoting challenge-seeking behavior, among other benefits. We also find that model-generated reframings outperform those from the GMSL-trained teachers. These results show promise for harnessing LLMs to provide automated GMSL feedback for teachers and, more broadly, LLMs’ potentiality for supporting students’ learning in the classroom. Our findings also demonstrate the benefit of large-scale human evaluations when applying LLMs in educational domains.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.549
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8877–8897
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.549
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.549
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kunal Handa, Margarett Clapper, Jessica Boyle, Rose Wang, Diyi Yang, David Yeager, and Dorottya Demszky. 2023. “Mistakes Help Us Grow”: Facilitating and Evaluating Growth Mindset Supportive Language in Classrooms. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8877–8897, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“Mistakes Help Us Grow”: Facilitating and Evaluating Growth Mindset Supportive Language in Classrooms (Handa et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.549.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.549.mp4