Abstract:

Every educator is faced with the challenge of presenting content that will be learned and not memorized only to be forgotten couple weeks later. Pedagogical creativity in the delivery of content is the first step in assuring students will retain course content rather than the traditional cramming of content prior to examination. To validate this pedagogical methodology a pretest-posttest control group design analysis was used. We implemented multi-method teaching approach that we called GMS Teaching (Growth-Mindset Teaching) in 14 sections of 2 different courses (Principles of Marketing MKT-2110 and Marketing Management MKT-4400) and used 14 additional sections as control groups.

GMS Teaching consisted of:
1) using class time as training room,
2) requiring students to submit all assignments prior to class to increase in-class discussion quality and engagement,
3) providing weekly feedback on students’ performance and how to improve,
4) allowing students to experience some failure without penalization, and
5) providing multiple opportunities for students to improve their performance. As a result students exposed to the GMS Teaching increased the growth-mindset level by 3.44% and decrease their fix-mindset level by 3.48%.

This research examined:
1) the GMS Teaching that leads students to develop/increase a growth-mindset and
2) the impact of GMS Teaching on students’ growth mind set and fix mind set.

We think higher education institutions as well as members of the academia in general will be interested in this research because, it offers an easy to implement teaching technique that helps students increase their growth-mindset levels while learning by actively interacting with their professor and classmates.

Keywords:

Growth mindset, fix mindset, higher education.