Brain Plasticity and Mindset in College Math Education

The world of math education is, these days, exciting, vibrant, and varied. I’m constantly finding wonderful new materials to use, new research to share, and new discussions to engage in.

One of my (many) struggles is this: so much of the research, and so many of the materials, are centered around K-12 students. I teach community college. My students are adults, some of them are well beyond their 20’s, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that none of them appreciate being treated as if they are 12. However, most of the materials and the research around K-12 math education (including some from middle school, and even elementary school) are relevant to these adult students, so I use them in my classroom. I spend a lot of time re-creating materials, not only to adapt them to my personal styles and curriculum, but often just to remove age branding. This week I’ve been using materials from the youcubed.org Week of iMath, and I didn’t have time to recreate all of the materials, so I used a pencil to scratch out “Grades 5-9” from the logo before making copies. 

This process is generally fine for printed materials; I can handle that burden (although it would be nice if I occasionally ran across some materials that I didn’t have to un-brand). The big issue is in the thought material that I share with my students. I showed them Jo Boaler's videos associate with the Week of iMath. I had them read Carol Dweck’s Brainology article. The videos have information that is extremely relevant to my students, but for an adult student, the style of the videos has the ability to exacerbate the very problem that they are attempting to address. Imagine: A student is taking the plunge to further her education, and has had a fixed mindset about her (lack of) mathematical abilities all of her life, and she's terrified to start this semester of Elementary Algebra. She knows she's never been good at it, and she knows that this is a necessary ingredient to her education, and it's daunting. And then, in week 1, the teacher shows a video with two messages: First, the wonderful message is announced loud and clear (with science!) that she is capable of doing math. But the second message is the permeating undertone that this is something that she should have accomplished years earlier, back when she was the age of the target audience. 

My students feel this way. I can feel it. Sometimes they cry when they tell me about their fears of math. In addition to all of the fears they have carried ever since they were pre-adult, they have the added shame of "This is something that 12-year-olds learn. I should have gotten it by now." They need to be given a clean slate and a sense of hope, which is very much accomplishable by the works of Carol Dweck and Jo Boaler and so many others, but unfortunately the pre-adult-targeted tone of so many of these works muddy the slate with that shame. 

Last week I had a class discussion about the Brainology article. It was generally a helpful and uplifting discussion for many of my students. However, one woman, who I guess to be in her 40's, asked, "They show how all of this mindset business works for kids. But are there any studies about how it works for adults? Is there any guidance to what adults can do to change their mindset?" From what I understand of the research, it's no less true for adults than it is for pre-adults. And I told her this, but it would be great if I could give her the same article that contained examples from the adult world. This week I pointed some students to this video by Jo Boaler presenting some evidence of brain plasticity and relating it to math education. The first verbal response I heard when I got in the classroom was "That's an interesting video. It was kind of meant for kids, though."  :(

So, I'm searching for short consumables that I can share with my adult students, which describe the wonderful research that's being done around brain plasticity and mindset, and how it applies to adult education.