PISA Dashboard

PISA examines the belief among fifteen-year-old students that their intelligence can be developed through feedback, effort, and effective strategies, and how this relates to their attitudes towards learning and the learning context, as well as their academic performance. Use the selector above to explore the findings for a specific country or economy.

Please note: Estimates for the following countries/economies  should be interpreted with caution, as one or more PISA sampling standards were not met — Australia, Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong (China), Ireland, Jamaica, Latvia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Panama, United Kingdom, and United States.

PISA 2022 highlights that students’ willingness to explore and persevere likely facilitate the turning of growth beliefs into effective learning. Curious students tend to benefit more from holding a growth mindset. Across OECD countries, they show an extra 12-point mathematics advantage, after accounting for socio-economic factors. Persistence plays a similar role. Students who keep going when the work is challenging show about a nine-point additional boost linked to having a growth mindset, compared with the least persistent students.

At the classroom level, teacher practices remain central. In mathematics, the gap between students with a growth mindset and those with a fixed mindset widens when teacher support is high, from 14 points in low-support classrooms to 19 points in high-support ones, on average. Support seems to help students act on their belief that effort leads to improvement. Challenging teaching practices show a similar pattern. When students engage with cognitively activating tasks (explaining solutions, connecting ideas, evaluating strategies) the advantage linked with a growth mindset increases from 14 to 20 points.

Yet this is not universal. In some systems, struggling students have little exposure to challenging instruction; in others, cognitive activation is applied evenly, and the strongest associations appear among students with moderate exposure.Yet this is not universal. In some systems, struggling students have little exposure to challenging instruction; in others, cognitive activation is applied evenly, and the strongest associations appear among students with moderate exposure.