![]() These students displayed a fixed mindset around history. ![]() These students reported that they did not make time for the course in their busy schedules because they had already resigned themselves to failure or struggle. A comment I kept seeing was that a student “didn’t like,” “wasn’t interested in,” “wasn’t good at,” or “hated” history. ![]() Reading through qualitative feedback provided on IDEA evaluations, Rate My Professor s, and student correspondence with me, I recognized that many students who struggled in the course needed help honing their learning skills and academic dispositions. Therefore, in preparation for summer 2021, I significantly revised HIST 1110 with an eye toward student success, eliminating assignments that some students perceived as “busy work.” Instead, I developed assessments that allowed students to immediately apply their content and analytical knowledge (Gossard, 2022). Although this DFWI rate may have been inflated because of significant personal and learning struggles resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, it was still something that greatly concerned me. That means that out of the 180 to 200 students enrolled each semester, up to 50 received a grade of D, failed, withdrew, or received an incomplete for the course. This is higher than the national DFWI average of 25.1% for introductory history courses (Koch & Drake, 2019). ![]() Unsurprisingly, my online sections of HIST 1110 carried a 27.6% DFWI rate in fall 2020 and spring 2021. While students have ample choice (with over 30 courses currently listed in the USU catalog as “Breadth Humanities”), students often arrive with little to no interest in the subject matter. As such, most students enroll to earn credit for this graduation requirement. HIST 1110 carries a Breadth Humanities (BHU) general education designation at Utah State University (USU). Student reflections are interspersed to demonstrate the impact these assignments have had on students’ perceptions of their learning. This chapter examines two of the Habits of Mind extra credit assignments in HIST 1110: “Growth Mindset” and “Confidence in Learning.” In the following, I detail the assignment instructions along with explanations of how these extra credit opportunities help to grow students’ Habits of Mind. While some students may always be disinterested in history, these Habits of Mind assignments can help them develop the skills and academic dispositions to persist through and succeed in college learning. In doing so, students develop Habits of Mind, including persistence, applying past knowledge to new situations, thinking about your thinking (metacognition), and thinking flexibly. Students must reflect on what they learned and apply new strategies to coursework in HIST 1110 (or another one of their courses). Each provides students training and guided content on a particular Habit of Mind. These assignments are reflective in nature. To help students develop a growth mindset and better skills around learning-even in those courses that they do not find inherently or immediately interesting-I created a series of extra credit assignments focused on various Habits of Mind in European History from 1500. Additionally, many online students, without the physical classroom and the community that space can build, lack perspective that academic success is not necessarily innate to an individual, but something that must be practiced and honed over time. This is especially true in online asynchronous courses where students must take control over their learning, which effectively allows them to push off work in courses in which they have a fixed mindset (Hochanadel & Finamore, 2015, p. Known as a “fixed” mindset, Dweck (2010) and Duckworth (2007) have explained that students stuck in this mindset lack the persistence to be successful in the face of adversity (Dweck, 2010, p. When students believe that success in a particular academic subject is an innate characteristic, they can resign themselves to accept that they may perform poorly in that subject. They were not able to remember historical details in past learning environments, so would a college history course be any different? One of the most common frustrations I hear from students in my large-enrollment history survey, HIST 1110: European History from 1500, is that they have “never been good at history.” Having taken numerous history courses during their K–12 education, many of which have focused on the rote memorization of dates, names, and facts about the past, students can arrive to HIST 1110 with an apathetic-or even a negative-disposition toward history as an academic discipline.
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