2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Low student success rates in lower division math courses represent one of the most common and critical barriers to college graduation rates across the United States (Meiselman & Schudde, 2022). The causes of this problem are multifaceted and vary across institutions, but it is evident from a wide range of national reports that math instructors often are not provided the training or resources necessary to best support student learning (e.g., Henderson et al., 2011).

To help address this concern, our team of motivation researchers and curriculum designers created the Motivating Learning Course. The course is an online, hands-on professional learning course that equips faculty to kick off their courses with empirically based motivationally supportive tools and language designed to help instructors create student-centered learning environments. Participants learn how to create messages and learning materials that support students to develop adaptive beliefs about learning and school. In particular, participants learn about three key learning mindsets— students’ beliefs about themselves and the learning context (e.g., Growth Mindset, Purpose and Relevance, and Sense of Belonging)—and workshop strategies for leveraging these mindsets in equity-supportive ways while being customized to their own courses, teaching methods, and styles of communication.

We delivered the Motivating Learners Course to a cohort of math faculty from a single department at a large state university in California during the 2022-2023 academic year. We evaluated the effectiveness of the course using institutional data from 60 math instructors, including 25 who participated in the course and a group of 35 control instructors teaching similar courses in the same department who did not participate in the Motivating Learners Course, and 3,118 students enrolled in these instructors’ courses.

We compared student outcomes data, including grades and pass rates, for students whose instructors participated in the Motivating Learners Course to those whose instructors did not. Results indicate that, overall, students taught by instructors who participated in the course earned significantly higher grades (M = 2.33, SD = 1.29, n = 1124) than those whose instructors did not (M = 2.19, SD = 1. 32, n = 1994), t (2820) = 2.87, p = .004, d = 0.11. Further, students with instructors who participated in the course (68.9%) had higher pass rates than those whose instructors did not (64.9%). This pattern of findings remained even after controlling for students’ cumulative GPA prior to beginning the target math class, as well as URM status and Pell grant recipient status. Follow-up analyses indicate that although comparisons across groups were not statistically different, students from underrepresented minority (URM) backgrounds and students who are Pell grant recipients tended to benefit the most from taking math courses from instructors who participated in the MLC.

These findings suggest that a brief, intensive, online professional development course for mathematics faculty can have downstream effects on student learning outcomes. Future research is needed to document changes to instructor’s knowledge, attitudes, and instructional practices as a result of taking the course, and how these changes impacted student learning outcomes.