Join us for the first Science Forum of the year! 

Dr. Lisa Limeri, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Texas Tech University, will be presenting her talk titled Measuring and exploring what students and instructors believe about intelligence. 

Abstract:

Students hold a variety of beliefs about their intellectual abilities, including whether they can improve and whether everyone or only some people have the potential to become brilliant. These beliefs are collectively called lay theories, and research indicates that they influence a wide variety of important educational outcomes, including motivation, resilience, grades, and retention. However, research in this field has been hampered by the lack of a high-quality, reliable, valid measure of these lay theories. We have developed and collected extensive validity evidence for a new measure of these beliefs, the Undergraduate Lay Theories of Abilities (ULTrA) survey. This survey is enabling us to understand the factors underlying undergraduate student success better than ever before. The forefront of this field is shifting attention to the instructors’ beliefs about students. Some early studies indicate that instructors’ beliefs about their students’ abilities influences student success and equity of students’ outcomes. To enable further investigation in this important area, we have adapted the ULTrA survey to effectively measure instructors’ beliefs. This measure will enable further research to investigate how instructors can effectively contribute to student success and equity.