  While many previous studies have indicated that encouraging a growth mindset
can improve student learning outcomes, this conclusion's applicability to
college-level astronomy classrooms remains poorly understood owing to the
variation in students' overall and domain-specific learning attitudes. To
address this, we surveyed undergraduate students in an introductory astronomy
class about their attitudes towards learning astronomy over the course of five
semesters. Overall, students felt an affinity for astronomy, felt moderately
competent, perceived astronomy to be intermediate in terms of difficulty, and
agreed strongly with standard statements reflecting a "growth mindset," i.e.,
the belief that intelligence is malleable rather than fixed from birth. Their
responses were stable over the course of the semester and did not appear to
depend strongly on student demographics. The unexpected start of the COVID-19
pandemic and the associated shift to all-virtual learning correlated with a
drop in their affinity for astronomy, a small decrease in their perceived
competence, and an increase in the perceived difficulty of the topic. Their
overall learning mindset showed negligible change during this time, emphasizing
the stability of their belief in a growth mindset as compared to other measured
learning attitudes. However, more nuanced questions about their behaviors and
interpretations in the classroom, about how they felt "in the moment", and
about what factors were most important for their success in the class revealed
significantly lower alignment with a growth mindset. This suggests that while
introductory astronomy students may believe that they have a growth mindset,
this mindset is not necessarily reflected in their self-reported classroom
behaviors or measured responses to actual learning challenges.
