PISA Peculiarities (1): Why doesn’t growth mindset work for Chinese students?
Having a growth mindset is negatively associated with academic performance for participating students from China (Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang or B-S-J-Z China), according to the 2018 PISA results. That is, Chinese students who had a fixed mindset scored higher in PISA reading than those who had a growth mindset. Considering that Chinese students’ stunning scores that put them way above all other students in the world, this finding should be disconcerting to proponents of growth mindset, including the PISA team.
Does this invalidate the belief that growth mindset result in improved academic performance? Not according to PISA:
PISA findings support the idea that instilling a growth mindset in students could result in better academic performance (Blackwell, Trzesniewski and Dweck, 2007[9]; McCutchen et al., 2016[10]). On average across OECD countries, students who disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement “Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much” scored 41 points higher in reading than students who agreed or strongly agreed with the statement. The former group of students scored 32 points higher than the latter group after accounting for the socio-economic profile of students and schools. (OECD, 2019, p. 203).
The China case can be treated as noise in the data, an anomaly, and outlier. After all, China is one of the only two education systems in which the relationship between growth mindset and PISA reading scores is negative. In fact, only in four education systems (B-S-J-Z, Hong Kong, Lebanon and North Macedonia) out of the over 70 participants in 2018 was there no positive relationship between the two. CONTINUE READING: Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » PISA Peculiarities (1): Why doesn’t growth mindset work for Chinese students?
