Changing Administrators: Toward a Behavioral Science of the Exosystem

Cameron Hecht

Psychological interventions targeting students and teachers have shown promise for reducing group-based academic disparities by fostering growth mindset-supportive classroom cultures, which emphasize learning and improvement over innate ability. However, even highly motivated teachers struggle to sustain equitable teaching practices when constrained by school administrators who enforce a rigid "culture of compliance." While principals hold the power to shape the broader educational exosystem—the administrative conditions that indirectly influence students' learning environments—they have largely been absent from behavioral science research. The current project addresses this gap by developing and testing a novel leadership intervention designed to help principals foster a school culture of growth. Using a mixed-methods approach embedded within a large-scale teacher fellowship, I will first conduct qualitative focus groups and preregistered vignette experiments to identify the administrative barriers that constrain teachers' ability to use growth mindset-supportive practices, as well as the core values that motivate principals. I will then use these insights to design an intervention that resonates with principals' primary motivations and shifts their practices in a way that addresses the identified teacher barriers. Finally, I will test the intervention in a randomized controlled trial, using Bayesian machine-learning methods to evaluate its impact on principals' practices. This research aims to provide a scalable model for altering the broader institutional context by intervening directly with the leaders who have the authority to reshape educational systems, ensuring that teachers have the institutional support necessary to cultivate equitable, growth-oriented classroom cultures.

About Cameron Hecht

Cameron Hecht is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Rochester. He conducts research at the intersection of social psychology and education, focusing on how psychological processes related to motivation and identity enable students to reach their academic potential. His work takes an ecological approach, aiming to identify the specific contextual features of learning environments that afford or undermine students' adaptive motivational beliefs. Building on these insights, Cameron develops targeted interventions that manipulate both individual beliefs and the situational affordances that support or constrain them, with the aim of addressing group-based disparities in students' academic outcomes. His research uses a combination of laboratory and field experiments, and he employs modern Bayesian machine-learning methods to model and understand the heterogeneous effects of interventions across contexts. Cameron has published his work in outlets such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Educational Psychology, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was an NSF-funded postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.