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Description
Faculty serve as the first point of contact for academic fields for many college students. Through this relationship, students infer how their professors perceive them via faculty’s beliefs about the supposed fixed or malleable nature of intelligence. Building upon past literature, the central aim of this study was to provide insight into how other belief systems may affect faculty mindset beliefs and to understand better factors that may contribute to this effect. The current study investigated if there is a relationship between Biology faculty’s system justifying beliefs and their fixed mindset beliefs. In addition, this study examined if that relationship could be affected by faculty demographics and institutional characteristics. An archival dataset of 552 biology faculty members surveyed from various 4-year universities across the U.S. was used to understand the relation between the two belief systems. Participant ages ranged from 28-77 (M = 47.9, SD = 10.4) with a nearly even number of faculty identifying as male (49.0%) and female (51.0%) and were predominantly White (83.2%). Participants viewed a brief video and read materials describing a novel intervention and its benefits to students' grades, interest, and persistence in science. Faculty then completed online surveys consisting of multiple measures examining responses to the videos and the material provided, demographic and job characteristics, and exploratory measures. Pearson’s correlation revealed that faculty’s system justifying beliefs was positively correlated with their fixed mindset beliefs. Additional t-tests showed that men were more likely to have fixed mindset beliefs compared to women and years teaching was positively correlated with fixed mindset beliefs in faculty. The relationship between faculty’s system justifying and fixed mindset beliefs were stable across both demographic and institutional variables. A relationship between faculty’s system justifying and fixed mindset beliefs was established in this study, providing initial evidence for a novel theoretical model. Furthermore, this relationship was stable and consistent across faculty demographics and institutional characteristics, suggesting that inconsistencies in beliefs about intelligence and society may affect this relationship more so than group membership. Additional research should be done to determine the causal nature of this relationship.
