Growth mindset and school archery: Thomas 2018 study

This is a doctoral dissertation in education (EdD) by a teacher studying two of his own sixth-grade classes at a public school in Lexington, South Carolina: 50 pupils, 29 boys and 21 girls, during the archery unit of an outdoor education course. After the baseline test the pupils worked through Brainology, a growth mindset programme of four online units and eleven classroom lessons (the idea that ability develops with effort), alternated with five days of shooting.

The mean score on the shooting test rose from 69 to 92 (standard deviations 31.5 and 27.8; t(49) = -4.89, p < 0.001). Both mindset questionnaires also went up: the general one on intelligence from 29 to 33, and the version rewritten for archery from 31 to 33. The central result lies elsewhere, though: the pupils whose mindset changed most were not the ones whose shooting improved most. The correlations between the two changes were r = -0.18 (p = 0.215) and r = 0.08 (p = 0.569), close to zero. In a later added analysis, the 28 pupils classed as having a growth mindset at the end of the unit had improved by 36 points on average, and the 22 with a fixed mindset by 6.5.

The unit lasted 35 school days. In the first ten the pupils learnt safety rules and technique, first in the classroom with a string bow and then on the range at 10 metres; the baseline test came on day eleven, deliberately after the basic teaching. From day fourteen to day thirty-three they worked on Brainology, in the shortened version of 15 days at 30 minutes a day, with five non-consecutive shooting days. The final test took place on day thirty-five.

The shooting test is adapted from the American schools programme NASP, without the 15-metre part: Genesis Original bows, Easton 1820 arrows, an 80 cm face at 10 metres, one practice end of 5 arrows and then scoring ends of 5. The teacher called and recorded each score, and the pupil initialled the scorecard. Mindset was measured with the Mindset Assessment Profile, a 10-item questionnaire answered on a 1 to 6 scale, and with a version in which the word intelligence was replaced by archery ability, which has never been validated. Alongside the numbers the author ran a focus group of eight pupils and collected their written reflections and his own observation notes.

There is no control group, so the improvement in shooting cannot be credited to the programme: between the two tests the pupils, who had only just started, had five more days of practice, and some said they also shot at home with family members. The main result itself points that way, since the change in mindset did not move with the change in score. The comparison between fixed and growth mindset was made after looking at the data, on groups formed from the final questionnaire.

The teacher was also the researcher and the scorer. The arrow count does not add up: the dissertation describes three ends of 5 arrows, but then totals 30 arrows with a maximum of 300 points, as in the full NASP test that includes 15 metres; the text does not make clear how many arrows the scores are based on. This is action research in a single school, not peer reviewed, and the author himself calls the results suggestive rather than conclusive.

For anyone teaching beginners, the dissertation mainly shows one thing: over a month-long school unit the pupils got better at shooting, but not because they had changed their view of their own ability, since the two moved independently. Some pupils in the focus group said they would rather have spent the time given to Brainology shooting, and the author ends by proposing to teach growth mindset differently, tying it to the content of each activity rather than leaving it to a programme with a classroom feel that many pupils did not connect with archery.

For an adult or competitive archer the study has nothing direct to offer: it measured 11 and 12 year olds with their first arrows, on a large face at 10 metres. In the registry it serves as an example of how hard it is to separate a mental intervention from plain practice when the people receiving it are still learning the shot.