Growth mindset and educational mobility

A study suggests that educational environments with low upward mobility reduce the potency of adaptive psychological processes. Growth mindset refers to the belief that individuals’ talents and abilities can be developed. This adaptive psychological process can motivate persistence. Lile Jia, Chun Hui Lim, and colleagues investigated how an environment’s educational mobility affects the potency of students’ growth mindsets. The authors analyzed a global dataset of academic performance, which also recorded growth mindsets, of 235,141 students from 30 mostly Western and industrialized countries. The analysis included a measure of educational mobility in each country: the percentage of students from low-education households who graduated from a university or trade school. Growth mindsets positively predicted students’ performance on math, science, and reading in all countries, but the effect was less potent in countries with low educational mobility. In a short-term experiment that attempted to manipulate 744 university students’ perception of mobility, growth mindsets predicted active learning on a computer test only for those students assigned to an environment of perceived high mobility. According to the authors, low-mobility environments interfere with the potential for growth in individual learners.

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Article #20-11832: “Stunted upward mobility in a learning environment reduces the academic benefits of growth mindsets,” by Lile Jia, Chun Hui Lim, Ismaharif Ismail, and Yia Chin Tan.

MEDIA CONTACT: Lile Jia, National University of Singapore, SINGAPORE; email: <

[email protected]

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