A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement

Second, we examined whether students might be discouraged from acting on their enhanced growth mindset when they attend schools in which peer norms were unsupportive of challenge-seeking, whereas peer norms that support challenge-seeking might function to sustain the effects of the intervention over time. We measured peer norms by administering a behavioural challenge-seeking task (the ‘make-a-math-worksheet’ task) at the end of the second intervention session (Fig. 1) and aggregating the values of the control group to the school level.

The pre-registered mixed-effects model yielded a positive and significant intervention × behavioural challenge-seeking norms interaction for GPA among the targeted group of lower-achieving adolescents, such that the intervention produced a greater difference in end-of-year GPAs relative to the control group when the behavioural norm that surrounded students was supportive of the growth mindset belief system, B = 0.11 (95% confidence interval = 0.01, 0.21), s.e. = 0.05, z = 2.18, n = 6,320, k = 65, P = 0.029, β = 0.23. The same conclusion was supported in a secondary analysis of only mathematics and science GPAs (Extended Data Table 2).