A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement.

A global priority for the behavioural sciences is to develop cost-effective, scalable interventions that could improve the academic outcomes of adolescents at a population level, but no such interventions have so far been evaluated in a population-generalizable sample. Here we show that a short (less than one hour), online growth mindset intervention-which teaches that intellectual abilities can be developed-improved grades among lower-achieving students and increased overall enrolment to advanced mathematics courses in a nationally representative sample of students in secondary education in the United States. Notably, the study identified school contexts that sustained the effects of the growth mindset intervention: the intervention changed grades when peer norms aligned with the messages of the intervention. Confidence in the conclusions of this study comes from independent data collection and processing, pre-registration of analyses, and corroboration of results by a blinded Bayesian analysis.

Mindset × Context: Schools, Classrooms, and the Unequal Translation of Expectations into Math Achievement.

When do adolescents' dreams of promising journeys through high school translate into academic success? This monograph reports the results of a collaborative effort among sociologists and psychologists to systematically examine the role of schools and classrooms in disrupting or facilitating the link between adolescents' expectations for success in math and their subsequent progress in the early high school math curriculum. Our primary focus was on gendered patterns of socioeconomic inequality in math and how they are tethered to the school's peer culture and to students' perceptions of gender stereotyping in the classroom. To do this, this monograph advances Mindset × Context Theory. This orients research on educational equity to the reciprocal influence between students' psychological motivations and their school-based opportunities to enact those motivations. Mindset × Context Theory predicts that a student's mindset will be more strongly linked to developmental outcomes among groups of students who are at risk for poor outcomes, but only in a school or classroom context where there is sufficient need and support for the mindset. Our application of this theory centers on expectations for success in high school math as a foundational belief for students' math progress early in high school. We examine how this mindset varies across interpersonal and cultural dynamics in schools and classrooms. Following this perspective, we ask: 1. Which gender and socioeconomic identity groups showed the weakest or strongest links between expectations for success in math and progress through the math curriculum? 2. How did the school's peer culture shape the links between student expectations for success in math and math progress across gender and socioeconomic identity groups? 3. How did perceptions of classroom gender stereotyping shape the links between student expectations for success in math and math progress across gender and socioeconomic identity groups? We used nationally representative data from about 10,000 U.S. public school 9th graders in the National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM) collected in 2015-2016-the most recent, national, longitudinal study of adolescents' mindsets in U.S. public schools. The sample was representative with respect to a large number of observable characteristics, such as gender, race, ethnicity, English Language Learners (ELLs), free or reduced price lunch, poverty, food stamps, neighborhood income and labor market participation, and school curricular opportunities. This allowed for generalization to the U.S. public school population and for the systematic investigation of school- and classroom-level contextual factors. The NSLM's complete sampling of students within schools also allowed for a comparison of students from different gender and socioeconomic groups with the same expectations in the same educational contexts. To analyze these data, we used the Bayesian Causal Forest (BCF) algorithm, a best-in-class machine-learning method for discovering complex, replicable interaction effects. Chapter IV examined the interplay of expectations, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES; operationalized with maternal educational attainment). Adolescents' expectations for success in math were meaningful predictors of their early math progress, even when controlling for other psychological factors, prior achievement in math, and racial and ethnic identities. Boys from low-SES families were the most vulnerable identity group. They were over three times more likely to not make adequate progress in math from 9th to 10th grade relative to girls from high-SES families. Boys from low-SES families also benefited the most from their expectations for success in math. Overall, these results were consistent with Mindset × Context Theory's predictions. Chapters V and VI examined the moderating role of school-level and classroom-level factors in the patterns reported in Chapter IV. Expectations were least predictive of math progress in the highest-achieving schools and schools with the most academically oriented peer norms, that is, schools with the most formal and informal resources. School resources appeared to compensate for lower levels of expectations. Conversely, expectations most strongly predicted math progress in the low/medium-achieving schools with less academically oriented peers, especially for boys from low-SES families. This chapter aligns with aspects of Mindset × Context Theory. A context that was not already optimally supporting student success was where outcomes for vulnerable students depended the most on student expectations. Finally, perceptions of classroom stereotyping mattered. Perceptions of gender stereotyping predicted less progress in math, but expectations for success in math more strongly predicted progress in classrooms with high perceived stereotyping. Gender stereotyping interactions emerged for all sociodemographic groups except for boys from high-SES families. The findings across these three analytical chapters demonstrate the value of integrating psychological and sociological perspectives to capture multiple levels of schooling. It also drew on the contextual variability afforded by representative sampling and explored the interplay of lab-tested psychological processes (expectations) with field-developed levers of policy intervention (school contexts). This monograph also leverages developmental and ecological insights to identify which groups of students might profit from different efforts to improve educational equity, such as interventions to increase expectations for success in math, or school programs that improve the school or classroom cultures.

Teacher Mindsets Help Explain Where a Growth-Mindset Intervention Does and Doesn't Work.

A growth-mindset intervention teaches the belief that intellectual abilities can be developed. Where does the intervention work best? Prior research examined school-level moderators using data from the National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM), which delivered a short growth-mindset intervention during the first year of high school. In the present research, we used data from the NSLM to examine moderation by teachers' mindsets and answer a new question: Can students independently implement their growth mindsets in virtually any classroom culture, or must students' growth mindsets be supported by their teacher's own growth mindsets (i.e., the mindset-plus-supportive-context hypothesis)? The present analysis (9,167 student records matched with 223 math teachers) supported the latter hypothesis. This result stood up to potentially confounding teacher factors and to a conservative Bayesian analysis. Thus, sustaining growth-mindset effects may require contextual supports that allow the proffered beliefs to take root and flourish.

The importance of STEM: High school knowledge, skills and occupations in an era of growing inequality.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) jobs have grown in importance in the labor market in recent decades, and they are widely seen as the jobs of the future. Using data from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey, we first investigate the role of employment in STEM occupations when it comes to recent changes in the occupational employment distribution in the U.S. labor market. Next, with data from the High School and Beyond sophomore cohort (Class of 1982) recent midlife follow-up, we investigate the importance of high school students' mathematics and science coursework, knowledge, and skills for midlife occupations. The Class of 1982 completed high school prior to technological changes altering the demand for labor. We find that individuals who took more advanced levels of high school mathematics coursework enjoyed occupations with a higher percentile rank in the average wage distribution and were more likely to hold STEM-related occupations. Findings suggest that the mathematics coursework enabled workers to adapt and navigate changing labor market demands.

Continuing Education and Stratification at Midlife.

We ask whether patterns of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic stratification in educational attainment are amplified or attenuated when we take a longer view of educational careers. We propose a model of staged advantage to understand how educational inequalities evolve over the life course. Distinct from cumulative advantage, staged advantage asserts that inequalities in education ebb and flow over the life course as the population at risk of making each educational transition changes along with the constraints they confront in seeking more education. Results based on data from the 2014 follow-up of the sophomore cohort of High School and Beyond offer partial support for our hypotheses. The educational attainment process was far from over for our respondents as they aged through their 30s and 40s: more than six of ten continued their formal training during this period and four of ten earned an additional credential. Patterns of educational stratification at midlife became more pronounced in some ways, as women pulled further ahead of men in their educational attainments and parental education (but not income), and high school academic achievement continued to shape educational trajectories at the bachelor's degree level and beyond. However, African American respondents gained on White respondents during this life phase through continued formal (largely academic) training and slightly greater conditional probabilities of graduate or professional degree attainment; social background fails to predict earning an associate degree. These results, showing educational changes and transitions far into adulthood, have implications for our understanding of the complex role of education in stratification processes.

Barriers to Bachelor's Degree Completion among College Students with a Disability.

One of the fastest growing groups on college campuses is students with disabilities, but their rates of bachelor's degree completion remain low. We build on research about barriers to degree completion among historically underrepresented groups on college campuses to examine the extent to which academic preparation before college and processes during college contribute to gaps in bachelor's degree completion among four-year college students with a mental or physical disability. Using the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study, we find that students with a mental disability are significantly less likely to complete a bachelor's degree than students without disabilities and students with a physical disability, net of students' family and academic background. Decomposition of the estimated indirect effect of mental disability on degree completion reveals first-year academic performance as the largest contributor. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications for understanding the barriers faced by college students with a mental disability.

Erratum: Who Gets Ahead and Who Falls Behind During the Transition to High School? Academic Performance at the Intersection of Race/Ethnicity and Gender.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/socpro/spx044.].

Who Gets Ahead and Who Falls Behind During the Transition to High School? Academic Performance at the Intersection of Race/Ethnicity and Gender.

Academic stratification during educational transitions may be maintained, disrupted, or exacerbated. This study marks the first to use national data to investigate how the transition to high school (re)shapes academic status at the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender. We seek to identify the role of the high school transition in shaping racial/ethnic and gender stratification by contextualizing students' academic declines during the high school transition within the longer window of their educational careers. Using Add Health, we find that white and black boys experience the greatest drops in their grade point averages (GPAs). We also find that the maintenance of high academic grades between the eighth and ninth grades varies across racial/ethnic and gender subgroups; higher-achieving middle school black boys experience the greatest academic declines. Importantly, we find that white and black boys also faced academic declines before the high school transition, whereas their female student peers experienced academic declines only during the transition to high school. We advance current knowledge on educational stratification by identifying the transition to high school as a juncture in which boys' academic disadvantage widens and high-achieving black boys lose their academic status at the high school starting gate. Our study also underscores the importance of adopting an intersectional framework that considers both race/ethnicity and gender. Given the salience of high school grades for students' long-term success, we discuss the implications of this study for racial/ethnic and gender stratification during and beyond high school.

Mental and physical health impairments at the transition to college: Early patterns in the education-health gradient.

Part of the education-health gradient may be related to inequalities in the transition from high school to college by health impairment status. In this paper, we use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to investigate the link between health impairments beginning prior to high school completion and college-going, distinguishing between individuals with mental, physical, or multiple health impairments and between enrollment in 2-year and 4-year postsecondary institutions. We find that individuals with mental impairments or multiple impairments are less likely to initially enroll in 4-year postsecondary institutions than individuals without health impairments, controlling on background and high school preparation. We also find evidence that advanced math course-taking in high school, an important step on the pathway to a 4-year college for all students, does not provide students with mental impairments the same return as students without health impairments. We discuss implications for policy to address educational inequalities in health.

Manufacturing Gender Inequality in the New Economy: High School Training for Work in Blue-Collar Communities.

Tensions between the demands of the knowledge-based economy and remaining, blue-collar jobs underlie renewed debates about whether schools should emphasize career and technical training or college-preparatory curricula. We add a gendered lens to this issue, given the male-dominated nature of blue-collar jobs and women's greater returns to college. Using the ELS:2002, this study exploits spatial variation in school curricula and jobs to investigate local dynamics that shape gender stratification. Results suggest a link between high school training and jobs in blue-collar communities that structures patterns of gender inequality into early adulthood. Although high school training in blue-collar communities reduced both men's and women's odds of four-year college enrollment, it had gender-divergent labor market consequences. Men in blue-collar communities took more blue-collar courses, had higher rates of blue-collar employment, and earned similar wages relative to otherwise comparable men from non-blue-collar communities. Women were less likely to work and to be employed in professional occupations, and they suffered severe wage penalties relative to their male peers and women from non-blue-collar communities. These relationships were due partly to high schools in blue-collar communities offering more blue-collar and fewer advanced college-preparatory courses. This curricular tradeoff may benefit men, but it appears to disadvantage women.

Measuring Education and Skill.

This article reviews recent developments in measuring education and skill that need to be taken into account in any new initiative to monitor social mobility. Over the past half-century, patterns of educational participation and attainment have become more heterogeneous, a trend that has been accompanied by increases in assessment and testing practices, and the availability of electronic data sources and other administrative records, including official school transcripts that are generally held indefinitely. This article describes the most promising approaches to measuring education and discusses some of the possible challenges for using the information to study social mobility. Measures of educational concepts fall along at least one of several dimensions: credentials earned, qualities of the schools attended, the amount and nature of curricular exposure, and the development and acquisition of skills. Selected data sources, with an emphasis on school transcripts and administrative records, and their possible uses are described.

College-Going Benefits of High School Sports Participation: Race and Gender Differences over Three Decades.

The long touted athlete advantage in college enrollment has been tempered by assertions that this advantage is actually due to characteristics that precede participation. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the benefits of sports extend into contemporary times, and apply equally to female and racial minority athletes. This study uses three nationally representative longitudinal datasets of students who were 10th graders in 1980, 1990, and 2002. We find that high school sports participation was positively associated with college enrollment, even with the utilization of propensity score modeling, for white boys and girls, black boys, and Latino boys and girls during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The most important gender and race differences include black female athletes' college-going disadvantage in the 1980s and 1990s, and girls' persistently lower rates of high school sports participation than boys'.

Gatekeepers of the American Dream: how teachers' perceptions shape the academic outcomes of immigrant and language-minority students.

High school teachers evaluate and offer guidance to students as they approach the transition to college based in part on their perceptions of the student's hard work and potential to succeed in college. Their perceptions may be especially crucial for immigrant and language-minority students navigating the U.S. educational system. Using the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), we consider how the intersection of nativity and language-minority status may (1) inform teachers' perceptions of students' effort and college potential, and (2) shape the link between teachers' perceptions and students' academic progress towards college (grades and likelihood of advancing to more demanding math courses). We find that teachers perceive immigrant language-minority students as hard workers, and that their grades reflect that perception. However, these same students are less likely than others to advance in math between the sophomore and junior years, a critical point for preparing for college. Language-minority students born in the U.S. are more likely to be negatively perceived. Yet, when their teachers see them as hard workers, they advance in math at the same rates as nonimmigrant native English speaking peers. Our results demonstrate the importance of considering both language-minority and immigrant status as social dimensions of students' background that moderate the way that high school teachers' perceptions shape students' preparation for college.

Family Socioeconomic Status, Peers, and The Pathto College.

Drawing on the primary/secondary effects perspective of educational inequality, this mixed methods study investigated connections between high school students' trajectories through college preparatory coursework and their relationships with parents and peers as a channel in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic inequality. Growth curve and multilevel analyses of national survey and transcript data revealed that having college-educated parents differentiated students' enrollment in advanced coursework at the start of high school and that this initial disparity was stably maintained over subsequent years. During this starting period of high school, exposure to school-based peer groups characterized by higher levels of parent education appeared to amplify these coursework disparities between students with and without college-educated parents. Ethnographic data from a single high school pointed to possible mechanisms for these patterns, including the tendency for students with college-educated parents to have more information about the relative weight of grades, core courses, and electives in college-going and for academically-relevant information from school peers with college-educated parents to matter most to students' coursework when it matched what was coming from their own parents.

Corporate Diversity Programs and Gender Inequality in the Oil and Gas Industry.

Since the 1980s, major U.S. corporations have embraced diversity as a management strategy to increase the number of women in top jobs. Diversity management programs include targeted recruitment, hiring, and promotions policies; mentoring programs; affinity groups; and diversity training. Few of these programs have proven effective in achieving gender diversity in the corporate world, despite their widespread popularity. To explore the reasons for this, the authors investigate the experiences of women scientists in the oil and gas industry who are targeted by these programs. In-depth interviews reveal possible reasons why these programs fail to achieve their intended goals. The authors find that these programs can paradoxically reinforce gender inequality and male dominance in the industry. The authors discuss alternative approaches for addressing gender inequality in work organizations and conclude with implications of their findings for corporate approaches to promoting diversity and for future research.

Equity or Marginalization? The High School Course-Taking of Students Labeled with a Learning Disability.

Placement of some students into the courses needed only for high school graduation, and others into those that prepare them for college constitutes academic stratification. This study uses data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to investigate whether students labeled with learning disabilities complete fewer academic courses by the end of high school compared to their peers who are not labeled. Results indicate large disparities in completion of college preparatory coursework, especially in math, science, and foreign language, even net of students' academic preparation for high school, and their cognitive and noncognitive skills. The evidence supports the possibility that school processes contribute to the poorer course-taking outcomes of students labeled with learning disabilities.

High School Transfer Students and the Transition to College: Timing and the Structure of the School Year.

The timing of a high school transfer may shape students' transitions to college through its (mis)alignment with the structure of the school year. A transfer that occurs during the summer interrupts the four-year high school career, whereas a transfer that occurs midyear disrupts both the four-year high school career and the structure of the school year. Using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), the investigators find that the penalty suffered after the transfer depends on the degree to which students' high school pathways synchronize with the curricular and extracurricular structure of the school year. Midyear transfer students appear to suffer the greatest postsecondary matriculation penalty. Students who transfer midyear are less likely to attend a four-year college compared with nontransfer and summer transfer students, whereas summer transfer students are less likely to attend a highly selective four-year college compared with their nontransfer counterparts. Curricular and extracurricular disruptions that transfer students experience after their school move explain some, but not all, of the negative associations observed between transferring and the transition to college. Directions for future research and the theoretical and policy implications of the results are discussed.

The Roles of Adolescent Occupational Expectations and Preparation in Adult Suicide and Drug Poisoning Deaths within a Shifting Labor Market.

Research suggests that economic declines contribute to mortality risks from suicide and drug poisoning, but how the economy impacts individuals' risks of these deaths has been challenging to specify. Building on recent theoretical advances, we investigate how adolescent occupational expectations and preparation contribute to suicide and drug poisoning deaths in a shifting economy. We use High School and Beyond data linked to adult mortality records for men that were exposed to a decline in labor market share and wages in predominantly blue-collar occupations during early adulthood. We find that adolescent men who expected these occupations had increased risks of suicide and drug poisoning death as adults net of educational and occupational attainment in early adulthood. Family background and occupational preparation are risk factors for death by drug poisoning but not suicide. Our findings improve our understanding of how labor market uncertainty shapes individuals' vulnerability to suicide and drug poisoning death.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same? Examining Gender Equality in Prior Achievement and Entry into STEM College Majors over Time.

This article investigates the empirical basis for often-repeated arguments that gender differences in entrance into STEM majors are largely explained by disparities in prior achievement. Analyses use data from three national cohorts of college matriculates across three decades to consider differences across several indicators of high school math and science achievement at the mean and also at the top of the test distribution. Analyses also examine the different comparative advantages men and women enjoy in math/science vs. English/reading. Regardless of how prior achievement is measured, very little of the strong and persistent gender gap in physical science and engineering majors over time is explained. Findings highlight the limitations of theories focusing on gender differences in skills and suggest directions for future research.

Gendered Organizations in the New Economy.

Gender scholars draw on the "theory of gendered organizations" to explain persistent gender inequality in the workplace. This theory argues that gender inequality is built into work organizations in which jobs are characterized by long-term security, standardized career ladders and job descriptions, and management controlled evaluations. Over the past few decades, this basic organizational logic has been transformed. in the so-called new economy, work is increasingly characterized by job insecurity, teamwork, career maps, and networking. Using a case study of geoscientists in the oil and gas industry, we apply a gender lens to this evolving organization of work. This article extends Acker's theory of gendered organizations by identifying the mechanisms that reproduce gender inequality in the twenty-first-century workplace, and by suggesting appropriate policy approaches to remedy these disparities.