Growth Mindset Incentive-Research Paper.
ABSTRACT There is great interest in leveraging video games to improve student engagement and motivation. However, educational games are not uniformly effective, and little is known about how in-game rewards affect children’s learning-related be- havior. In this work, we argue that educational games can be improved by fundamentally changing their incentive structures to promote the growth mindset, or the belief that in- telligence is malleable. Growth Mindset Incentive-Research Paper.We present “brain points,” a system that encourages the development of growth mindset behaviors by directly incentivizing effort, use of strategy, and in- cremental progress. Through a study of 15,000 children, we show that the “brain points” system encourages more low- performing students to persist in the educational game Re- fraction when compared to a control, and increases overall time played, strategy use, and perseverance after challenge. We believe that this growth mindset incentive structure has great potential in many educational environments.
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Author Keywords Educational games; growth mindset; incentive structures. Growth Mindset Incentive-Research Paper.
ACM Classification Keywords H.5.0 Information Interfaces and Presentation: General
INTRODUCTION Video games are famous for their ability to engage play- ers and motivate them to perform complex, time-consuming tasks. Most children today are exposed to games on a daily basis; 92% of children ages 2 to 17 play video games, for an average of 20 to 33 minutes per day [16]. As a result, there is a growing interest in leveraging games to address the problem of student motivation in educational environments [11, 25, 23]. Game incentive structures, or the systems of rewards that are given to successful players, have elicited particular attention for their potential to motivate students [18]. How- ever, games have produced mixed learning outcomes in the classroom [14, 21, 23], and the effects of in-game praise and rewards on motivation and learning are not well understood. Growth Mindset Incentive-Research Paper.
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A growing body of research in psychology suggests that feed- back such as praise can have varying, and sometimes nega- tive, effects [24, 13]. Praising a student’s inherent ability has been shown to promote the fixed mindset, or the belief that in- telligence is unchangeable, while praising a student’s strategies or effort promotes the growth mindset, or the belief that intelligence is malleable [24, 13]. Studies have shown that children with a fixed mindset view mistakes, challenge, and effort as negative indicators of their intelligence, while chil- dren with growth mindset view effort as positive and chal- lenges as opportunities to learn [9, 15]. More importantly, holding a fixed mindset predicts static or decreasing academic performance over time, while holding a growth mindset predicts academic improvement [3, 12]. Growth Mindset Incentive-Research Paper.