Investigating the benefits of professional development on pre-service teachers' mindset and persistence

Mindset is a factor of how students' core beliefs allow them to engage with an area, particularly their deep thinking and understanding of mathematics; however, many find adjusting their mindset about mathematics difficult when they view something as a challenge. Two factors that are known to affect students’ mindset are, their persistence and how to look at mathematical tasks that use multiple strategies (MS). This study explored pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) mindset, more growth, or more fixed when doing mathematical tasks that can use MS affects their perception of challenging tasks and students’ view of persistence in students that were PST. Six PSTs were studied more in-depth to answer two questions 1) How do learning experiences and opportunities affect PSTs’ persistence on challenging mathematics tasks? and 2) How do PSTs change their perception of a challenging mathematics task when they know MS are available to use? If PSTs are not persisting, was it because of their view of the challenging mathematics task, or was it because they do not have more of a growth mindset. If PSTs were not persisting, was it because their view of the challenging task was affected by the lack of knowledge about MS, or that they do see the use of using MS in mathematics. This study found that a moderate growth mindset helped promote high levels of persistence; an extreme growth mindset may limit the effects of PSTs using MS. PSTs with more mixed mindsets or moderate growth mindsets and high levels of persistence think about and use MS more often. Relationships among mindset, persistence, and MS are further investigated, and implications for teacher education program efforts are discussed.