Prospects for students as students see them: A Mind Genomics Exploration

To determine what young people (ages 13–27) feel about the prospects of students after they leave school, we investigated systematically varied vignettes about schools. The vignettes comprised statements (elements) about teachers, the students, the response of the community to the school, and the behavior of the students, respectively, the elements combined according to an experimental design. The data suggest that it is the specific messages, not the general categories of messages, which drive the expectations of good versus poor performance. There is evidence for at least two mind-sets, those focused on the teacher-student relationship versus those focused on the teacher-community relationship. We present the PVI, personal viewpoint identifier, to assign new students to one of the two mind-sets.