A case study of a formative education approach and its effects on growth mindset and achievement attitudes in upper secondary students

Abstract We study a novel approach to formative education developed by the public upper secondary school Anna Whitlock’s Gymnasium in Stockholm, Sweden. The school’s educational philosophy, which is based on the concepts of Bildung and assidēre (“to sit beside”), entails a significant focus on formative teaching. We describe the school’s approach to formative education and evaluate it by studying its effects on the students’ growth mindsets and attitudes regarding academic achievement. We use a mixed-methods approach utilizing both survey data and focus group data. Our results show several expected positive results on the school-wide level, but also significant variation between different classes. We select four classes for further study and by analysing the focus group data from these classes we tentatively explore the causal impact of the school’s formative education approach on the students’ growth mindset and achievement attitudes.