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Lots of educators and librarians are becoming more and more aware Carol Dweck’s mindset research – the belief that talent and ability our not fixed, but that our efforts, combined with deliberative practice and expert feedback, can help us improve our ability to learn within a particular domain – and, as with any good intellectual idea (cf. the Humanistic Psychology Movement), people have started to adopt a superficial understanding of the idea that leads to poor applications of it.

Dweck has recently addressed some of these misunderstandings in a recent piece in Education Week that’s really worth checking out.

Interesting excerpt:

A growth mindset isn’t just about effort. Perhaps the most common misconception is simply equating the growth mindset with effort. Certainly, effort is key for students’ achievement, but it’s not the only thing. Students need to try new strategies and seek input from others when they’re stuck. They need this repertoire of approaches—not just sheer effort—to learn and improve.

We also need to remember that effort is a means to an end to the goal of learning and improving. Too often nowadays, praise is given to students who are putting forth effort, but not learning, in order to make them feel good in the moment: “Great effort! You tried your best!” It’s good that the students tried, but it’s not good that they’re not learning. The growth-mindset approach helps children feel good in the short and long terms, by helping them thrive on challenges and setbacks on their way to learning. When they’re stuck, teachers can appreciate their work so far, but add: “Let’s talk about what you’ve tried, and what you can try next.”

Alex Carroll and Robin Dasler have an important new article out on “Scholarship is a Conversation: Discourse, Attribution, and Twitter’s Role in Information Literacy Instruction” in The Journal of Creative Library Practice that I wanted to draw to the attention of our readers. The article nicely models how we can teach the deep, conceptual structure of something like “why it’s important to cite stuff,” and does so while building a narrative around scholarship as conversation, using a relevant case study students will understand – Twitter – as a meaningful, real-life example.

In my view, one reason this kind of instruction is deeply valuable is that, according to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham’s summary of the research on the cognitive science of learning,

The surest way to help students understand an abstraction is to expose them to many different versions of the abstraction […] new things are understood by relating them to things we already understand [… ] it’s not simply that giving concrete examples helps. They must also be familiar examples … It’s not the concreteness, it’s the familiarity that is important.

Why Don’t Students Like School? pp. 88-90.

Hence, using Twitter – a concrete example that is familiar to students – is a really effective method from the standpoint of evidence-based teaching practice to teach students the difficult abstract ideas of “attribution” and “scholarship as conversation.”

An excerpt from “Scholarship is a Conversation“:

When addressing scholarly attribution, citation, and plagiarism in one-shot instruction sessions, librarians often fail to present these issues in a manner that has relevance for students. Librarians often focus on intellectual honesty and the potential ramifications of plagiarism, both individual pursuits, rather than explaining that by creating an academic work, students are participating in academic discourse […]

One of the major deficiencies of this compliance-based instruction is that it presents students with a false dichotomy that does not align with their authentic life experiences; plagiarism is demonstrated as a black and white issue, rather than existing in shades of gray. Students who have come of age within a twenty-first century information ecosystem rife with remix and parody culture will likely find teaching that presents the re-use of source material as a non-nuanced issue unconvincing. Because students respond positively to instruction that aligns with their authentic experiences, this suggests that librarians need to develop new methods for teaching attribution and scholarly discourse that not only recognize the nuance inherent to these topics, but also presents these concepts within a familiar framework . As a familiar platform for social interaction with multiple avenues for giving credit and a shorter timescale, Twitter presents an opportunity to place attribution, plagiarism, and integrity into a humanizing, real world context that models how discourse unfolds in an authentic manner for learners. By embedding attribution instruction into a meaningful context, librarians and other educators can make substantial and much needed improvements to traditional compliance-based instruction, which is often built upon the slow, rigid, and unfamiliar patterns of how to cite scholarly works […]

Rather than limiting attribution to the realm of in-text citation and bibliographies, librarians working within libraries of all types should consider connecting these issues to case studies, which can convey to the public and students of all ages that attribution and copyright have relevance beyond the confines of academic writing.

Great case study in teaching students in a relevant way that moves beyond pointing and clicking; definitely worth a read, and a fine example of quality work in evidence-based information literacy instruction.