Growth Mindsets and Achievement: Evidence Across Academic and Creative Domains From an International Perspective

Developing students' transversal skills, such as creativity, alongside strong academic foundations, has become an increasing priority for education systems worldwide. However, most existing research on mindsets and achievement has focused on general intelligence growth mindsets or growth mindsets in academic domains, particularly mathematics, leaving the role of mindsets in transversal skill development largely unexplored.

This study examines how growth mindset about general intelligence and domain-specific growth mindsets in mathematics, reading, and creativity are associated with achievement in mathematics, reading, and creative problem solving using data from 471,971 students across 64 education systems, drawn from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022. We extend prior research, which has largely focused on general intelligence or mathematics mindsets in single-country contexts, by analyzing multi-domain and cross-national patterns. To address unobserved individual-level confounders, we leverage within-student, between-domain variation in mindsets and achievement, providing a more rigorous assessment of domain-specific associations. We additionally estimated models separately by gender, socioeconomic background, immigrant status, and OECD versus non-OECD systems to examine how associations vary across student and system contexts.

Growth mindsets vary systematically across domains, with mathematics showing the lowest prevalence and general intelligence beliefs the highest. Domain-specific growth mindsets are positively associated with domain-congruent achievement in mathematics and reading, but not in creativity. Associations vary by student background, being stronger for girls, advantaged students, and those in OECD countries.

Findings suggest that growth mindsets are domain-bound rather than universal, with implications for theory, measurement, and the design of interventions tailored to academic and transversal skill domains.