Mindsets, attitudes and learning

Executive summary

The 2022 cycle of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) revealed a decline in the share of students who believe their abilities can grow through effort and in response to feedback, i.e. those with a growth mindset. On average across OECD countries, 58% of 15-year-olds endorsed this view in 2022, five percentage points fewer than in 2018. A growth mindset contrasts with a fixed mindset, which views intelligence as innate and unchangeable. This decline occurred alongside a broader drop in academic performance during the COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring the growing importance of perseverance, adaptability and effort.

1. Growth mindset across different student groups

Despite the overall decline in growth mindset compared to 2018, PISA 2022 results confirm that a growth mindset remains positively associated with student performance. On average, students who disagreed that “intelligence cannot change very much” scored 18 points higher in mathematics and 22 points higher in reading and science than those who agreed, even after accounting for socio-economic profile of students and schools.

The prevalence and implications of growth mindset vary across gender, socio-economic background and performance level.

• Gender: Gender gaps in prevalence are small overall, but where they exist, the performance advantage linked with growth mindset tends to favour girls, resulting in an average score difference of 27 score points for girls versus 22 for boys across OECD countries.

• Socio-economic status: Advantaged students are about nine percentage points more likely to report a growth mindset than their disadvantaged peers. Yet some systems, such as Korea, Germany and Chinese Taipei, combine high prevalence with relatively equitable distributions, demonstrating that mindset can be widespread without mirroring social divides.

• Performance level: Growth mindset is most common among high performers (67%) and least common among low performers (49%). The performance gap associated with mindset is largest for mid-performing students (proficiency Levels 2-4), whose achievement trajectories can still move substantially up or down. Among low performers, the association is weaker or absent, suggesting that beliefs in improvement may not always align with the support and environment available to act on them.

2. Mindset within a broader motivational system

Growth mindset operates as part of a wider network of motivational and socio-emotional beliefs.

• Self-efficacy, curiosity and persistence: Growth mindset tends to align with higher self-efficacy (confidence in performing tasks), greater curiosity and stronger persistence, particularly among mid performers. Curiosity and persistence act as amplifiers of the association between mindset and achievement, but for low performers the links with these attitudes are weak or negative, pointing to a potential mismatch between beliefs and classroom opportunities.

• Emotional control and stress resistance: Students who manage emotions and stress effectively tend to perform better and report less anxiety. For them, the additional performance advantage linked with a growth mindset is smaller (between four and seven score points less), suggesting that strong regulation could substitute growth mindsets’ relationship with academic achievement.

• Mathematics anxiety: Across OECD countries, students with a growth mindset generally feel less anxious about mathematics. The negative relationship is strongest in high-performing systems such as Japan, Denmark and Chinese Taipei but inconsistent among low performers, reflecting that reduced anxiety could depend on learning and cultural contexts as well as on other beliefs.

3. Teacher practices and the learning environment

Classroom experiences shape how a growth mindset translates into learning.

• Teacher support and relationships: Supportive environments enhance the growth mindset-better performance link. Across the OECD, the performance gap between growth- and fixed-mindset students rises from 14 to 19 points when teacher support is high. A similar pattern is seen with positive student–-teacher relations.

• Cognitive activation (challenge): When students engage in demanding tasks that require reasoning, connecting ideas and evaluating solutions, the performance gap rises from 14 to 20 points. These practices work best when challenge is balanced with guidance.

• Nuances for struggling students: Among low performers, associations with teacher support are often weak or negative. This may reflect compensatory dynamics, meaning teachers offering extra help to weaker students whose expectations, fuelled by growth beliefs, are not always met by their experiences of progress.

4. Clustering and inequality in school contexts

Mindset beliefs cluster within schools and mirror broader structural inequalities. Students in schools with a high concentration of growth-mindset peers score, on average, 37 points higher in mathematics than those in low-mindset schools.

However, the clustering of growth mindset in some schools can reflect underlying differences in opportunity rather than drivers of performance. Concentrations of growth mindset correspond closely to socio-economic composition of schools, possibly mirroring the distribution of resources, opportunities and expectations.

5. Policy directions to improve growth mindset and its impact

Across the analyses, a consistent finding emerges: growth mindset is most beneficial when supported by the skills, relationships and structures that make it impactful. Key policy directions for improving growth mindset and its impact are as follows:

1. Tailor approaches to learner profiles: Growth mindset functions differently across performance groups. Support for struggling learners should combine encouragement with scaffolding and concrete opportunities for success. For mid performers, aligning mindset promotion with confidence-building and proactive learning habits helps sustain progress. For top performers, maintaining engagement and challenge is key.

2. Embed growth mindset within a broader skill set: Effective tailored strategies integrate growth mindset with efforts to strengthen self-efficacy, persistence, curiosity and emotional regulation. These traits can reinforce each other, shaping how students approach learning and cope with setbacks.

3. Equip teachers to balance challenge and support: Teacher training and continuous professional learning should help educators combine adapted cognitively demanding instruction with academic and emotional support.

4. Address structural and school-level inequities: Reducing the clustering of low-mindset environments in disadvantaged schools requires tackling the underlying segregation of resources and expectations. In contexts where many low-performing students are concentrated, policy should focus on improving teaching quality, feedback and learning opportunities and on creating an environment where positive learning attitudes are linked to students’ success.

Growth mindset is one central element of a system of motivational beliefs and attitudes that relate to how students engage with learning and respond to challenge. Yet, its prevalence can be shaped by student characteristics and by the opportunities schools provide.

The key task for policymakers is therefore to create conditions where these beliefs are reinforced by daily experience. Students’ belief that they can grow and improve is strongest where education systems ensure that they do.