Mindsets, attitudes and learning

This policy paper examines the distribution and relevance of students’ growth mindset beliefs, drawing on data from the 2022 cycle of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It highlights a drop in the prevalence of a growth mindset —the belief that intelligence can develop through feedback, effort and effective strategies—between 2018 and 2022. Nevertheless, it shows that students with a growth mindset generally achieve higher scores in mathematics, reading and science, than their peers with a fixed mindset. This paper shows that a growth mindset is most common among high performers, yet the strongest performance differences linked with it appear among mid-performing students. Among low performers, the associations with achievement are weaker or inconsistent. A growth mindset also aligns positively with self-efficacy, curiosity, persistence and lower mathematics anxiety, though these associations vary by performance level. Moreover, at the classroom level, when teachers support students and cognitively challenging instruction is prevalent, the performance gap between growth- and fixed-mindset students is wider. But this pattern is not observed among struggling learners. At the school level, growth mindset clusters mirroring socio-economic disparities. These analyses highlight the importance of policies that pair mindset-supportive practices with equitable access to quality teaching and learning environments.