Classroom environment predicts changes in expressed intellectual humility

Expressing intellectual humility – admitting one's ignorance and mistakes – can facilitate learning, but how to encourage expression of intellectual humility in students remains an open question. The goal of the current longitudinal study (N = 547 youth) was to understand how teaching practices and perceptions of the classroom environment shape expressed intellectual humility in middle school students. In multilevel Bayesian analyses with informative priors, mastery-oriented teaching practices predicted changes in perceived mastery goal structure, which in turn predicted changes in expressed intellectual humility over one school year. The classroom environment in the first school year also predicted changes in expressed intellectual humility in the next school year. These findings suggest classrooms that emphasize learning for learning's sake can precipitate changes in adolescents’ willingness to express intellectual humility.