Helping more university students, especially under-represented minorities, complete STEM degrees and enter the STEM workforce has proven to be difficult. Those most at risk benefit least from innovations addressing only pedagogy or curriculum. Research suggests that we must influence students' self-efficacy: their belief that they can overcome setbacks and ultimately succeed. We present the results of a four-year NSF-funded project to develop and test a brief, scalable classroom intervention for improving students' STEM self-efficacy by teaching growth mindset and success attribution. We developed and validated a questionnaire to measure STEM self-efficacy, growth mindset, and perceived academic control. Using a quasi-experimental design with a control treatment, at three universities with very different student demographics (total N = 853), HLM analysis shows that our intervention significantly increases students' growth mindset but not their self-efficacy or perceived academic control.

A student's academic self-efficacy is a variable that predicts student achievement and persistence in STEM, and substantial research has focused on developing and testing interventions to increase STEM self-efficacy. Results have been inconsistent: Some efforts produced desired outcomes while others show weak or null effects. What factors affect whether a self-efficacy intervention is successful? Based on our experiences with an NSF-funded project that developed and tested a classroom-based self-efficacy intervention in university Physics courses, we identify three critical research issues that shape and complicate STEM student self-efficacy research, ground them in the literature, and illustrate them in practice. They are: (1) defining and measuring self-efficacy, (2) accounting for context, and (3) understanding related psychosocial factors. We conclude with implications for future research.