The Relationship Between Growth Mindset And Learning Engagement Among High School Students: The Longitudinal Mediating Role Of Academic Self-efficacy And Effort Belie

The key of high quality education system was high quality education and teaching.Students’ academic engagement was vital factor for high-quality education and teaching.Recent studies have found that the situation of Chinese students’ academic engagement was not optimistic.Moreover,high school students were confronted with the double pressure of increasing academic difficulty and College Entrance Examination,so they need a high level of academic engagement to gain an advantage in the fierce competition.Therefore,exploring high school students’ academic engagement and its influencing factors was important to improve the learning competence and promote high quality education and teaching’ development.Studies have shown that growth mindset,academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs were closely related to academic engagement.However,the mechanism of growth mindset affecting academic engagement was still unclear.Therefore,based on the self-efficacy theory and Dweck’s implicit theory,this study proposed that academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs both played a mediating part in the relationship between growth mindset and academic engagement,and cross-sectional and longitudinal studies were used to verify this.The first study was designed to examine the mediating and chain mediating role of academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs in the relationship between growth mindset and academic engagement using a cross-sectional research design.A questionnaire was used to measure the growth mindset,academic self-efficacy,effort beliefs and academic engagement of763 subjects,and a structural equation model was constructed to test the mediating and chain mediating effects of academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs on growth mindset and academic engagement.The aim of study 2 was to use a longitudinal study design to examine the predictive relationship between academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs and their delayed mediating and delayed chain mediating role between growth mindset and academic engagement.Firstly,the cross-lag research method was used to measure the academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs of623 subjects at two time points 4 months apart,and the predictive relationship between academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs was explored,which confirmed the view that academic self-efficacy predicted effort beliefs and provided support for the establishment of the chain mediation model.Secondly,structural equation models were used to explore the delayed mediating and delayed chain mediating effects of academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs on the relationship between growth mindset and academic engagement.The results showed that:(1)The cross-sectional results of study 1 showed that growth mindset could predict academic engagement either directly or indirectly through academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs’ mediating effects,or indirectly via the chain mediating effects of academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs.(2)The longitudinal results of Study 2 showed that T1 academic self-efficacy positively predicted T2 effort beliefs.T1 growth mindset could not only indirectly predict T2 academic engagement through the full mediating effects of T2 academic self-efficacy and T2 effort beliefs,but also could predict T2 academic engagement through the chain mediating effects of T2 academic self-efficacy and T2 effort beliefs.The main conclusions of this study were as follows:(1)Academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs played an important mediating and chain mediating role between growth mindset and academic engagement of high school students;(2)High school students’ growth mindset could not only indirectly have an effect on academic engagement through the delayed mediating effect of academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs,but also indirectly affect academic engagement by means of the delayed chain mediating effect of academic self-efficacy and effort beliefs.