Growth mindset as a structural link between parental support and academic stress among mathematically high-achieving elementary students with gifted education experience

Mathematically high-achieving elementary students with gifted education experience may experience academic stress. This study examined structural associations among perceived parental support, growth mindset, self-regulated learning, and academic stress, with supplementary exploratory comparisons of latent means across gender.

Cross-sectional data from the second wave of the Korean Education Longitudinal Study 2013 (KELS 2013) were analyzed for 238 sixth-grade students who had participated in gifted education programs and answered at least 22 of 25 items correctly on a mathematics basic competency assessment. After testing measurement invariance across gender, latent mean differences were examined. Structural equation modeling controlling for gender and 5,000 bias-corrected bootstrap resamples were used to estimate direct and indirect associations.

Parental support was positively associated with growth mindset and self-regulated learning, and growth mindset was positively associated with self-regulated learning and negatively associated with academic stress. The direct paths from parental support and self-regulated learning to academic stress were not significant. A significant negative indirect association between parental support and academic stress through growth mindset was found. Supplementary gender comparisons indicated higher perceived parental support among boys and higher academic stress among girls.

A negative indirect association between perceived parental support and academic stress through growth mindset was observed in this sample. The measures assessed general beliefs and academic experiences. The cross-sectional findings do not establish mathematics-specific processes, temporal ordering, or causal mechanisms.