YOU CAN DO BETTER! - AN EXPERIMENTAL PERSPECTIVE ON GROWTH MINDSETS, EDUCATIONAL MOBILITY, AND ACADEMIC SUCCESS

Abstract

Growth mindsets have been found to positively influence academic outcomes for students in various domains. However, much less is known about key boundary conditions, psychological affordances, and experimental manipulations which can either amplify or attenuate the effectiveness of prospective growth mindset interventions. This study thus seeks to fill the critical gap in research that lies between the informed development of growth mindset intervention frameworks and the long-term, tangible success of said interventions. We hypothesise that experimentally-induced growth mindsets would positively predict learning behaviour that is consistent with deliberate and effortful practice, albeit in learning environments of high educational mobility (an important affordance). Accordingly, this paper adapts a longitudinal novel task paradigm which notably involves experimental manipulations of educational mobility (Jia et al., 2021) and incorporates a crucial experimental manipulation of growth mindsets to establish causal effects. Results revealed non-significant relationships between experimentally-induced growth mindsets and learners’ practice efforts in both the high and low educational mobility experimental conditions. Nonetheless, the findings of the present study underscore the importance of informed and optimal experimental design frameworks which represent the core driving mechanism of large-scale growth mindset interventions in contemporary education.