Shifting the mindset culture to address global educational disparities.

Educational outcomes remain highly unequal within and across nations. Students' mindsets-their beliefs about whether intellectual abilities can be developed-have been identified as a potential lever for making adolescents' academic outcomes more equitable. Recent research, however, suggests that intervention programs aimed at changing students' mindsets should be supplemented by programs aimed at the changing the mindset culture, which is defined as the shared set of beliefs about learning in a school or classroom. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical origin of the mindset culture and examines its potential to reduce group-based inequalities in education. In particular, experiments have identified two broad ways the mindset culture is communicated by teachers: via informal messages about growth (e.g., that all students will be helped to learn and succeed), and formal opportunities to improve (e.g., learning-focused grading policies and opportunities to revise and earn credit). New field experiments, applying techniques from behavioral science, have also revealed effective ways to influence teachers' culture-creating behaviors. This paper describes recent breakthroughs in the U.S. educational context and discusses how lessons from these studies might be applied in future, global collaborations with researchers and practitioners.

The Role of Student Beliefs in Dual-Enrollment Courses.

Access to dual-enrollment courses, which allow high school students to earn college credit, is stratified by race/ethnicity, class, and geography. States and colleges have begun using multiple measures of readiness, including non-cognitive measures of student preparedness, in lieu of strict reliance on test scores in an attempt to expand and equalize access. This practice was accelerated by COVID-19 due to disruptions in standardized testing. However, limited research has examined how non-cognitive beliefs shape students' experiences and outcomes in dual-enrollment courses. We study a large dual-enrollment program created by a university in the Southwest to examine these patterns. We find that mathematics self-efficacy and educational expectations predict performance in dual-enrollment courses, even when controlling for students' academic preparedness, while factors such as high school belonging, college belonging, and self-efficacy in other academic domains are unrelated to academic performance. However, we find that students of color and first-generation students have lower self-efficacy and educational expectations before enrolling in dual-enrollment courses, in addition to having lower levels of academic preparation. These findings suggest that using non-cognitive measures to determine student eligibility for dual-enrollment courses could exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, inequitable patterns of participation. Students from historically marginalized populations may benefit from social-psychological as well as academic supports in order to receive maximum benefits from early postsecondary opportunities such as dual-enrollment. Our findings have implications for how states and dual-enrollment programs determine eligibility for dual-enrollment as well as how dual-enrollment programs should be designed and delivered in order to promote equity in college preparedness. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11162-023-09740-z.

The Correlates of Credit Loss: How Demographics, Pre-Transfer Academics, and Institutions Relate to the Loss of Credits for Vertical Transfer Students.

Despite the long-standing centrality and growing prevalence of transfer in the American postsecondary system, students, college professionals, and policymakers decry the lack of credit transferability between colleges. However, limited research has examined the factors most related to the magnitude of credit loss students experience. This study investigated how students' pre-transfer academic characteristics, demographic characteristics, and the institutions they transferred to and from influenced the magnitude of credit loss they experienced. Data is drawn from statewide cohorts of vertical transfer students in two states: Hawaii and North Carolina. Although a number of demographic and pre-transfer academic factors were found to relate to credit loss, the predictors of credit loss varied appreciably across states. Given the significant variability in how states and postsecondary systems manage transfer and articulation, the findings point to the need for additional state-level research exploring the determinants of credit loss for transfer students.

The Value of an Incomplete Degree: Heterogeneity in the Labor Market Benefits of College Non-Completion.

Many undergraduates leave college without completing a degree or credential. Some researchers characterize this as a waste of the student's time because (they assert) college short of a degree does not yield any advantage in the labor market. Using data for an entire cohort of students graduating high school in Texas in one year, we compare the employment and earnings years later of those who do not go beyond high school with those who enter college but do not complete a credential. Using techniques that address selection bias, we find that students with "some college" are considerably more likely to be employed fifteen years after high school graduation and tend to earn significantly more than their counterparts who do not go to college. These benefits are found across student subgroups, with low-income students, women, and students of color generally experiencing the greatest improvements in labor outcomes from college attendance. While college dropouts do not fare as well as college graduates, incomplete college nevertheless functions for many as a stepping-stone into a better labor market position.