Growth Mindset Feedback as an Effective Practice to Prompt Orthography Improvements in High-School Students Writing

Abstract

A growth mindset feedback values mistakes, shows progress and creates positive challenges to foster improvements. This article analyzes the potential that this type of feedback has and explores its usefulness in the teaching of orthography in secondary students, a group that has been neglected in previous research related to spelling.For that purpose, an experimental study was conducted with tenth-grade students from a school in Chile. A control group received regular feedback, which only indicated when a word was misspelled and how it should be spelled correctly; while a treatment group received growth-minded feedback.In this exploratory study, the results are encouraging, showing that the treatment group improved its spelling, especially in the use of tildes. These findings are relevant for educators who teach writing and leave the challenge of creating assessment policies and teacher training programs that should include a growth mindset framework.