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Abstract Whether a growth mindset can effectively improve the academic literacy of adolescents， especially help students from poor families to narrow the academic gap， is an important issue related to the quality and equity of education. Using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) of four provinces/ municipalities in China， this paper examines the effects of a growth mindset on students’ reading， mathematics and science literacy from an implicit theoretical perspective. A comparison of the two groups indicates that students from disadvantaged families are significantly more likely to develop a growth mindset than those from advantaged families. After controlling for self-selection bias by using inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA)， the study finds that a growth mindset does not show positive effects on reading， mathematics and science literacy. On the contrary， it even significantly reduces academic literacy. The subsample heterogeneity analysis shows that the growth mindset only has a weak positive effect on the academic literacy on the lowest quantile of students. As a whole， the impact of a growth mindset on the academic literacy of students from disadvantaged families is significantly negative. The main reasons for this negative impact is the “ceiling effect” under the extremely fierce academic competition and the rigid use of inefficient learning strategies， which greatly weaken or even reverse the potential positive influence of a growth mindset. Before intervention， it is necessary to carefully evaluate the true validity of a growth mindset， especially to be wary of the reversed growth mindset trap.
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Received: 23 September 2022
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2022, Vol. 61 
