Browsing by Author "Mills, Devin J. (TTU)"

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The good, the bad, and the mixed: Experiences during COVID-19 among an online sample of adults
(2022) Mills, Devin J. (TTU); Petrovic, Julia; Mettler, Jessica; Hamza, Chloe A.; Heath, Nancy L.
Studies have outlined the negative consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic to psychological health. However, the potential within-individual diversity of experiences during COVID-19, and how such experiences relate to indices of psychological distress and COVID-19specific stressors, remains to be explored. A large online sample of American MTurk Workers (N = 3,731; Mage = 39.54 years, SD = 13.12; 51.70% female) completed short assessments of psychological distress, COVID-19-specific stressors (e.g., wage loss, death), and seven items assessing negative and positive COVID-19 experiences. Latent profile analyses were used to identify underlying profiles of COVID-19 experiences. A four-profile solution was retained representing profiles that were: (1) predominantly positive (n = 839; 22.49%), (2) predominantly negative (n = 849; 22.76%), (3) moderately mixed (n = 1,748; 46.85%), and (4) high mixed (n = 295; 7.91%). The predominantly positive profile was associated with lower psychological distress, whereas both the predominantly negative and high mixed profiles were associated with higher psychological distress. Interestingly, specific COVID-19 stressful events were associated with the high mixed profile. The present study challenges the narrative that the impacts of COVID-19 have been unilaterally negative. Future directions for research are proposed.
Undergraduates’ reactions to errors mediates the association between growth mindset and study strategies
(2024) Chouvalova, Anastasia (TTU); Navlekar, Anisha S. (TTU); Mills, Devin J. (TTU); Adams, Mikayla (TTU); Daye, Sami (TTU); De Anda, Fatima (TTU); Limeri, Lisa B. (TTU)
Background: Students employ a variety of study strategies to learn and master content in their courses. Strategies vary widely in their effectiveness for promoting deep, long-term learning, yet most students use ineffective strategies frequently. Efforts to educate students about effective study strategies have revealed that knowledge about effective strategies is by itself insufficient for encouraging widespread and lasting changes. An important next step is to uncover factors that influence the decisions students make about study strategy use. We explored the association between beliefs about intelligence (mindset, universality, and brilliance) and study strategies. The most effective study strategies are error-prone, and beliefs about intelligence carry implications for whether errors are a normal and even beneficial part of the learning process (e.g., growth mindset) or signs of insufficient intelligence (e.g., fixed mindset). Therefore, we hypothesized that beliefs about and reactions to errors would mediate a relationship between beliefs about intelligence and study strategies. We tested this hypothesis by surveying 345 undergraduates enrolled in an introductory biology class at a public, research-active university in northwestern United States. Results: Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the internal structure of all measures functioned as expected in our sample. We fit a structural equation model to evaluate our hypothesized model. We found that mindset, but not universality nor brilliance, predicts variance in both beliefs about errors and reactions to errors. In turn, adaptive reactions to errors (but not beliefs about errors) are associated with the use of highly effective study strategies and spacing study sessions. There was a significant indirect relationship between growth mindset and spacing of study sessions. Conclusions: Our results provide evidence for a mechanism explaining the association between students’ mindset beliefs and academic outcomes: believing that intelligence is improvable is associated with more adaptive reactions to making errors, which correlates with choosing more error-prone and therefore more effective study strategies. Future interventions aimed at improving students’ study strategies may be more effective if they simultaneously target reacting adaptively to errors and emphasize that intelligence is improvable.