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.

A dual-system, machine-learning approach reveals how daily pubertal hormones relate to psychological well-being in everyday life.

The two studies presented in this paper seek to resolve mixed findings in research linking activity of pubertal hormones to daily adolescent outcomes. In study 1 we used a series of Confirmatory Factor Analyses to compare the fit of one and two-factor models of seven steroid hormones (n = 994 participants, 8084 samples) of the HPA and HPG axes, using data from a field study (https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/38180) collected over ten consecutive weekdays in a representative sample of teens starting high school. In study 2, we fit a Bayesian model to our large dataset to explore how hormone activity was related to outcomes that have been demonstrated to be linked to mental health and wellbeing (self-reports of daily affect and stress coping). Results reveal, first that a two-factor solution of adolescent hormones showed good fit to our data, and second, that HPG activity, rather than the more often examined HPA activity, was associated with improved daily affect ratios and stress coping. These findings suggest that field research, when it is combined with powerful statistical techniques, may help to improve our understanding of the relationship between adolescent hormones and daily measures of well-being.

Chemiluminescent immunoassay overestimates hormone concentrations and obscures testosterone sex differences relative to LC-MS/MS in a field study of diverse adolescents.

Background: Methodological comparisons of hormone quantification techniques have repeatedly demonstrated that, in adults, enzyme immunoassay (EIA) inflates steroid hormone concentrations relative to mass spectrometry. However, methodological comparisons in adolescent samples remain rare, and few studies have examined how chemiluminescent immunoassay (CLIA), another popular immunoassay, compares to mass spectrometry. Additionally, no studies have examined how differences in analytical techniques may be affecting relationships between steroid hormone levels and outcomes of interest, such as psychopathology. This pre-registered analysis of an existing dataset measured salivary cortisol and testosterone using both CLIA and liquid chromatography dual mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) in a repeated measures (516 samples) sample of 207 9th graders. Methods: In aim 1, this study sought to expand on past findings by 1) measuring inflation of testosterone and cortisol by CLIA in a relatively large adolescent sample, and 2) showing that CLIA (like EIA) testosterone inflation was especially true in groups with low 'true' testosterone levels. In aim 2, this study sought to examine the impact of hormone quantification method on relationships between hormone levels and psychopathological measures (the Children's Depression Inventory, the Perceived Social Stress Scale, the UCLA Loneliness Scale, and the Anxious Avoidant and Negative Self Evaluation subscales of the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents). Results: We found that CLIA, like EIA, inflated testosterone and cortisol levels and overestimated female testosterone resulting in suppressed sex differences in testosterone. We did not observe these same patterns when examining testosterone in individuals with differing levels of pubertal development. Results of psychopathology analyses demonstrated no significant method differences in hormone-psychopathology relationships. Conclusions: Our findings show that CLIA introduces proportional bias in cortisol and testosterone in a manner that suppresses sex differences in testosterone. Steroid measurement method did not significantly moderate the relationship between hormones and psychopathology in our sample, though more work is needed to investigate this question in larger, clinical samples.

A New Pathway to University Retention? Identity Fusion With University Predicts Retention Independently of Grades.

Individuals who are "strongly fused" with a group view the group as self-defining. As such, they should be particularly reluctant to leave it. For the first time, we investigate the implications of identity fusion for university retention. We found that students who were strongly fused with their university (+1 SD) were 7-9% points more likely than weakly fused students (-1SD) to remain in school up to a year later. Fusion with university predicted subsequent retention in four samples (N = 3,193) and held while controlling for demographics, personality, prior academic performance, and belonging uncertainty. Interestingly, fusion with university was largely unrelated to grades, suggesting that identity fusion provides a novel pathway to retention independent of established pathways like academic performance. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.