Characterizing the content and mechanisms of instructor messages that communicate instructor beliefs about ability to undergraduates

Instructors’ beliefs about their students’ abilities (called “lay theories”) and student perceptions of instructors’ beliefs impact students’ outcomes. Lay theories include three beliefs: mindset (improvability of intelligence), universality (distribution of potential for achieving high ability), and brilliance (whether talent is required for success). There is growing literature explaining how instructors’ mindset beliefs affect students, but little known about instructors’ universality and brilliance beliefs, despite evidence that all three beliefs uniquely impact student outcomes. Our qualitative study (1) characterizes the content and mechanism of instructor messages that inform students’ perceptions of instructors’ beliefs and (2) compares how different beliefs are communicated. We interviewed 24 STEM undergraduates about how they perceive their instructors’ beliefs. We identified four themes of content of instructor messages that communicate beliefs: affordances for success, goal orientations, distribution of achievement, and attributions for performance. We identified three mechanisms through which these messages are communicated: statements, actions, and course structure and policies. We also found that students assume their instructors’ beliefs based on instructor, class, or institution characteristics or their own beliefs. Students use all the message contents and mechanisms to infer all three beliefs, though not in equal frequencies. Our results provide practical implications to enhance instructor-student communication.