The analyses presented in this policy paper show that the great value of a growth mindset lies in how it intersects with students’ backgrounds, self-beliefs, socio-emotional skills, and classroom and school environments. Across countries, a recurring message emerges: growth mindset is most strongly associated with positive outcomes when it aligns with other supports and contexts, and less so when it stands alone.
PISA 2022 results underline that growth mindset is unevenly distributed. Disadvantaged and low-performing students are less likely to report having it, and when they do, the relationship with achievement is inconsistent or sometimes negative. Mid-performing students, by contrast, tend to report more coherent motivational profiles in which growth mindset beliefs, self-confidence and proactive study behaviours reinforce each other. For top performers, growth mindset appears less salient, as established skills and efficacy anchor their learning. These patterns highlight that, to be effective, policies should avoid one-size-fits-all approaches. Instead, the design of mindset-related initiatives should account for performance levels and socio-economic contexts, ensuring that encouragement to believe in growth mindset is matched with the resources and opportunities to make progress tangible.
The evidence also suggests that mindset is embedded within a network of other beliefs and skills. It is most consistently linked with stronger self-efficacy, lower anxiety, and more proactive learning strategies among students in the middle of the proficiency scale. Among low performers, however, these links are often absent. Socio-emotional skills add a further dimension – curiosity and persistence tend to amplify the benefits of mindset, whereas emotional control and stress resistance are more closely tied to well-being than to academic progress. These patterns reinforce that growth mindset cannot be separated from the wider set of psychological and socio-emotional conditions that shape how students approach learning.
At the classroom level, teacher practices remain central, but their effects are not uniform. Supportive environments and positive student-teacher relationships are associated with larger performance differences between growth- and fixed-mindset students. Low performers, however, can report more critical perceptions of teaching and teacher relationships when they hold growth mindset beliefs in some systems, potentially because growth mindset students who still perform poorly might experience or recognise lower-quality learning environments. Cognitive activation – teaching practices that require students to explain, connect and evaluate – further strengthens the alignment between growth mindset beliefs and achievement. The implication is that support and challenge need to be balanced.
At the school level, growth mindset also clusters, reflecting how broader structural inequalities shape students’ learning experiences. Students in schools with high concentrations of growth mindset beliefs tend to achieve higher performance levels, though these schools are often socio-economically advantaged. This pattern suggests that differences in beliefs about improvement are partly a mirror of differences in opportunity. Systems showing negative imbalance – where low-mindset schools predominate – or with wide dispersion, where students are divided between high- and low-mindset schools, risk reinforcing inequities in both beliefs and outcomes. By contrast, systems that move toward a positive imbalance with compact dispersion – i.e. more students learning in growth-oriented environments and fewer isolated in low-mindset contexts – are better positioned to provide consistent and equitable opportunities for all learners.
Taken together, the evidence points to a set of priorities for policymakers seeking to strengthen the role of growth mindset in education systems:
Tailor approaches to learner profiles: Strategies should recognise that low, mid and top performers experience growth mindset differently. Supports for struggling learners need to combine encouragement with scaffolding, while mid-performers benefit most when beliefs align with confidence and proactive strategies.
Embed growth mindset within a broader skill set: Interventions are most promising when combined with efforts to strengthen self-efficacy, reduce anxiety and develop socio-emotional skills such as persistence and curiosity.
Equip teachers to balance support and challenge: Mindset is more likely to be meaningful in classrooms where teachers provide both encouragement and cognitively activating tasks, and where students’ perceptions of support match their needs.
Address school-level inequities: Reducing the clustering of low-mindset environments in disadvantaged schools by tackling the underlying inequitable distribution of resources, opportunities and expectations. In contexts where low-performing students are over-represented, strategies should begin with students’ specific learning needs rather than from mindset promotion alone, improving the overall quality of learning opportunities so that adaptive beliefs can develop as a result of equitable and engaging education for all.
Overall, the challenge is not to promote growth mindset in isolation, but to ensure that students who believe in their potential also experience the instructional, relational and systemic conditions that allow those beliefs to be sustained.