Distinct Roles Of Different Types Of Mindset On High School Students’ Academic Motivation And Achievement

In China’s current education system,academic performance has always been the core element for evaluating students’ learning development,and it is also a widely concerned indicator of academic outcomes for both schools and society.Adaptive learning motivation can exert a lasting and stable promoting effect on students’ academic performances.In recent years,the theory of mindset is one of the research hotspots in the field of motivation.Mindset is an implicit belief about whether intelligence is malleable or not,among which a growth mindset posits that intelligence is malleable,while a fixed mindset believes that intelligence is unchangeable.Significant controversy still exists in previous research on the relationship between mindsets and academic achievement,the dimensional definition of these two mindsets also has some ambiguities.Therefore,the present study mainly analyzed Chinese high school students’ perceptions on these two mindsets and their unique impacts on students’ learning motivation and academic achievement.This study combined a dual perspective of the variable-centered and the personcentered approaches,recruiting first-year high school students from Shandong and Sichuan province as participants.The first study,based on a sample of 878 students,explored the mechanism of mindsets from the variable-centered approach through confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling in SPSS and Mplus,The results indicated that:(1)Growth mindset and fixed mindset are two independent dimensions that should be simultaneously investigated in research.(2)Growth mindset and fixed mindset have different influence mechanisms.Growth mindset positively predicted self-efficacy,interest value,and effort cost.In contrast,fixed mindset negatively predicted self-efficacy and interest value,while positively predicted effort cost.(3)Mindset did not directly affect high school students’ academic achievement,but indirectly influenced it through some motivational factors.Specifically,effort cost served as a negative mediator between growth mindset and academic achievement.Fixed mindset influenced academic achievement through declined self-efficacy and increased effort cost.The second study,based on a sample of 983 students,explored the mechanism of mindset from a person-centered perspective through confirmatory factor analysis and latent profile analysis.The results showed that:(1)Four latent categories of academic motivation were identified: Low Motivation Group,Moderate Motivation Group,Adaptive Motivation Group,and Performance-Sensitive Motivation Group.The Adaptive Motivation Group demonstrated the highest academic achievement,while the Low Motivation Group presented the lowest academic achievement.(2)Students with a fixed mindset were more likely to be assigned to the Low Motivation Group,while those with a growth mindset were more likely to fall into the Adaptive Motivation Group.This study explores the effects of two different types of thinking patterns on high school students’ learning motivation and academic achievement from different research perspectives.The results provide important supplementary evidence for the relationship between mindsets and learning motivation and academic achievement,and contribute to the debate on the influence mechanisms of the relationship between mindsets and academic achievement.Furthermore,the findings of this study have important practical implications,providing new insights into how to cultivate growth mindsets in middle school students in a targeted manner,and promoting more targeted and personalized interventions for diverse student groups in educational practice.