Grit and growth mindset among high school students in a computer programming project: A mixed methods study

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of grit (“passion and perseverance for a long-term goal”) and growth mindset in grade 11 high school students (Terminological clarification: Throughout this paper the term ‘students’ refers to the pupils in secondary education before university. In the South African discourse they are typically refered to as ‘learners’.), as they code a non-trivial programming project in Java. Students are guided through the stages of the development of a programming project by the teacher and are given a rubric describing the criteria for assessment. The project is scaffolded by the teacher. Assessments are frequent with detailed feedback provided to the students. The students’ grit and mindset are measured using questionnaires to form part of the quantitative data, together with the number of times each student submitted his project. Six students were interviewed to provide detailed qualitative data to interrogate the qualitative data. Although the correlation between the grit and mindset was weak, a stronger correlation was determined between the number of submissions and the project scores.