Designing Growth Mindset-Inspired Feedback Messages Tailored to Learning Behaviors Using LLM and Persuasive Strategies
TL;DR
This work introduces a four-part feedback message structure inspired by the growth mindset principle, which encourages students to reflect, persist, and embrace challenges, and provides an initial foundation for explainable, rule-based feedback generation that can be extended through experimentation with learners.
Abstract
Encouraging effort and persistence over performance is the core principle of a growth mindset, which can be useful in sustaining engagement in e-learning. One way to promote a growth mindset is to provide effective feedback to students. To contribute to this area, we introduce a four-part feedback message structure (tone-setter, highlight, suggestion, and growth-mindset) inspired by the growth mindset principle, which encourages students to reflect, persist, and embrace challenges. The messages are tailored to learners’ behaviors, formed by persuasive strategies, and generated using a Large Language Model (LLM). To evaluate this structure, we conducted a small study with 19 instructors who reviewed and rated the feedback messages to identify the strengths and areas for refinement. The results indicate that instructors approved the motivational intent of the messages but recommended refining the structure and simplifying the language. These findings offer useful insights that can guide the use of LLMs in developing motivational feedback systems tailored to learning behavior. The study provides an initial foundation for explainable, rule-based feedback generation that can be extended through experimentation with learners to assess the messages’ influence on their learning behaviors, to increase the personalization of the messages to the learner’s persuadability, and their adaptivity to dynamic learning contexts.