The purpose of the paper I read was to compile and synthesize articles published from 1998 to 2017 on the relationship between mindset and academic achievement and explore the role of mindset in academic achievement. Previous reviews from 2011 to 2016 examining the relationship between students’ mindsets and their performance indicate that mindset has an essential role in learning. In 2000, Dweck's review of findings based on her 30 years’ research illustrated that people’s implicit theories not only affected their self-judgment and played an important role in their adaptive or maladaptive functioning, but also affected the way in which they judged and treated others. Later in 2012, her research indicated that a growth mindset could “advance conflict resolution between longstanding adversaries, decrease even chronic aggression, foster cross-race relations, and enhance willpower”. By introducing the SOMA (setting/operating/monitoring/achievement) model into a quantitative synthesis of research collected from the year 1988 to 2010, Burnette, O’Boyle, VanEpps, Pollack, and Finkel’s (2013) meta-analysis demonstrated that implicit theories predicted self-regulatory process, which in turn, predicted goal achievement. Specifically, goal setting, goal operating, and goal monitoring hold promise for linking incremental beliefs directly to goal achievement.
By comparison, there is less research on the relationship between teachers’ mindsets and students’ achievement. However, intervention studies have demonstrated that mindset can be changed, and thus, students’ academic achievement can be improved. Tirri and Kujala (2016) reviewed brain research on mindset from the perspective of neuropsychological mechanisms, which indicated support for Dweck’s theory: students’ mindsets were adaptive and associated with their learning processes. Crucially, students could be influenced by appropriate interventions, since even “very brief intervention including knowledge on the value of effort and the potential for brains to adapt to new information has had a positive influence on students’ learning”.
The article suggests that from previous reviews, one may conclude that, through the mediation of social-cognitive approaches, mindset can predict numerous aspects of individual achievement, including academic, cognitive, motivational, effective and even socioeconomic; however, those reviews on mindset seem to have some limitations. First, even though the reviews indicate that mindset affects learning, which is in line with Dweck’s theory, they do not focus on academic achievement as measured by grades. Second, the nature of the approach is slightly singular and specific. For example, Burnette et al.’s (2013) meta-analysis provides a broad view of the relationship between self-regulation and mindset. However, in addition to quantitative studies, mindset has also been studied with qualitative and mix-method approaches, yielding valuable information about mindsets in classroom interaction, especially in connection with teachers. Thirdly, in previous reviews, mindset has mostly been regarded as an independent variable that predicts the dependent variable, which is achievement. However, the role of mindset could be investigated more broadly beyond “cause” alone.
In summary, previous research may lack a focus on the role of mindset in academic achievement. The purpose of the present article is to explore the role of mindset in students’ academic achievement. The research questions are as follows: Research Question 1: What is the role of students’ mindsets in their academic achievement? Research Question 2: What is the role of teachers’ mindsets in students’ academic achievement?
All in all, the result of this study points out that although there is a limited amount of relevant research on teachers’ mindsets in students’ academic achievement, the available studies suggest that teachers’ mindsets play the roles of both cause and mediator. And more studies find teachers’ mindsets to be a causal factor than a mediator. It is evident in the studies that students’ and teachers’ mindsets are associated with students’ academic achievement in various means. Specifically, students’ mindsets play the roles of cause and mediator. Mindset can also be an outcome of students’ academic achievement, while the roles played by teachers’ mindsets were cause and mediator. The result suggests that students’ mindsets are related to their academic performance and that their academic achievement can be affected by intervention. Furthermore, it appears that in measuring the long-term effect of the intervention, teachers’ mindset-related messages play an important role in the classroom.