Belonging & Mindset

Team Name: Belonging and Mindset

Team Lead: Danielle Mancuso

Team Members: Deb Brown (past member) Rachel Jochem (past member), Larry Locke, Vicki Suter

The importance of belonging and having a growth mindset, especially for first-generation and under-represented first-year students, is difficult to overstate. Research strongly suggests that students who believe their intelligence can grow and feel that they belong in college are much more successful (1). The Belonging and Mindset team has primarily been involved in supporting other initiatives and programs on campus, such as the Center for Instructional support and New Student Orientation. For example, NSO has updated its orientation activities to foster a strong sense of student belonging. NSO and the CIS created a shared theme for the Fall 2017 Instructional Institute to facilitate a sense of belonging to a larger community among all SOU faculty, staff, and students. Finally, growth mindset and belonging have been integrated into the CDA.

Moving forward, the Belonging and Mindset initiative would like to work more with the College Transition Collaborative team and the research they’ve been conducting on various mindset interventions. Preliminary indications from CTC indicate that the first-year SOU student cohort is a bit different from those at other CTC campuses, and that we may need to develop different kinds of interventions. Bringing those insights to other areas of campus, including faculty (either as part of the CDA or not), campus advising, and Student Life, and seeing how to integrate them to bring a unified and self-reinforcing message of belonging and growth mindset to all students across campus would be extraordinarily powerful. This will require faculty and staff time, but the work required should be manageable within existing workflows and workloads. Faculty development and encouragement will be important.

1 Paunesku, D., Walton, G., Romero, C., Smith, E., Yeager, D., & Dweck, C. (2015). Mind-Set Interventions Are a Scalable Treatment for Academic Underachievement. Psychological Science, 26(6), 784-793.