Online courses are increasingly used to scale up professional learning. However, engaging people throughout a course and encouraging them to take actions afterward is challenging, especially with culturally diverse participants whose response to encouragement may vary. Social norms can serve as a strong encouragement to participants, but they are mostly unobservable in online courses. We therefore tested how communicating three established kinds of social norms impacts behavioral outcomes and how the effects vary across different cultures. Findings from a randomized controlled field experiment in a Massive Open Online Course entitled Nature Education show that both the type of norm message (descriptive; dynamic; injunctive) and the cultural context (China; US) influence how the intervention improves course outcomes: US participants’ completion rate rose 40% following an injunctive norm message stating that participants ought to conduct nature education, while other norm messages were ineffective for both US and Chinese participants. Regardless of the social norm message, nearly all participants engaged in nature education activities within three months after the course ended. Communicating social norms can impact participants’ behavior in the course and beyond, which can offer a strategy for supporting online professional learning and tailoring messages to different cultural contexts.
The underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in computer science presents a challenge for training the next generation of scientists. The decision to pursue a professional and academic career in computing can be influenced by early experiences and mindsets in K-12 learning environments. However, we have a limited understanding of how student mindsets influence engagement in a variety of classroom contexts during high school computer science classes--one of the early gateways to computer science. We conducted a national longitudinal study of students in advanced placement computer science courses to understand how student mindsets impact engagement, how their mindsets evolve over time, and how contextual factors at the teacher, classroom, and school level can influence these temporal dynamics. We find that mindsets differentially impact engagement and vary by students’ gender and status of racial underrepresentation. Some mindsets change over time due to course feedback, and these changes affect engagement and performance in different ways. Class characteristics (e.g., class size and female proportion) and school characteristics (e.g., proportion of students who are eligible for free lunch and proportion of racially underrepresented students) moderate the effect of mindsets on student outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for learning theories and equity-focused educational practices.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.