School underachievement is a persistent problem in the United States. Direct-to-student, computer-delivered growth-mindset interventions have shown promise as a way to improve achievement for students at risk of failing in school; however, these interventions benefit only students who happen to be in classrooms that support growth-mindset beliefs. Here, we tested a teacher-delivered growth-mindset intervention for U.S. adolescents in Grades 6 and 7 that was designed to both impart growth-mindset beliefs and create a supportive classroom environment where those beliefs could flourish ( N = 1,996 students, N = 50 teachers). The intervention improved the grades of struggling students in the target class by 0.27 standard deviations, or 2.81 grade percentage points. The effects were largest for students whose teachers endorsed fixed mindsets before the intervention. This large-scale, randomized controlled trial demonstrates that growth-mindset interventions can produce gains when delivered by teachers.

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Black women are underrepresented in all ranks of higher education, from tenured faculty to university presidents. There is a need for academic leadership programs that support Black women’s rise to positions of leadership within academia. Dialogues in Leadership Herstory (DiLH) is a professional-development program that supports women’s exploration of leadership in higher education through coaching. Its design of a short-term, high-impact group mentorship engages female faculty and staff at varying stages of their careers and offers them glimpses of opportunities through the narratives of successful female academic leaders. The study reported on here sought to explore the experiences of Black female psychology faculty who participated in DiLH during the spring 2021 virtual cohort. Through autoethnographic methodology, major themes that emerged across the experience included overcoming fear of vulnerability and imposter feelings, a redefining of leadership, empowerment, self-discovery, and the value of the support that comes from a community of women. In this paper recommendations are made for programs designed to support the needs of Black women in the academy.

Her research focuses on identifying and better understanding factors that contribute to the participation and success of students in STEM education and careers. She has expertise in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method research and program evaluation.

Recent studies have suggested that quality of delivery matters to achieve better student outcomes in the context of school interventions. However, studies rarely measure quality of delivery and test its association with students’ outcomes, perhaps due to lack of clarity regarding how to measure it. Here, we offer recommendations on how to select or design measures of quality of delivery. These recommendations focus on identifying teaching practices that help students to develop proximal outcomes during the delivery of an intervention. Additionally, we illustrate an application of these recommendations to the study of quality of delivery in a cluster-randomized efficacy study of Brainology, a program that promotes students’ motivation and learning. We found that, although teachers fluctuated in their quality of delivery across lessons, students who received the intervention with higher quality of delivery on average increased more in targeted proximal outcomes (effort beliefs and learning goals) than students exposed to low quality. We discuss these results in terms of their implications for measuring quality of delivery, supporting teachers, and studying the conditions that make school interventions successful.