How does one's “mindset” contribute to statistical learning? A moderated mediation model of growth mindset of statistical ability on statistical learning outcomes

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether “growth mindset” contributes to statistical learning in the social sciences, and to address the controversy whether growth mindset is positively associated with academic achievement. Students enrolled in a statistics course were invited to participate in a two-stage online questionnaire, resulting in cross-sectional data (including only the first-wave data) and longitudinal data (two-wave data). Both cross-sectional and longitudinal data show that compared with general growth mindset, statistical growth mindset has a significant indirect effect on academic achievement in statistics courses acting through academic engagement, which supports the idea of “domain specificity”. Perceived difficulty moderated the effect of the statistical growth mindset and academic engagement, only in cross-sectional data. This study provides empirical evidence for the application of a statistical growth mindset to statistical learning and partially addresses the controversy over the predictive effect of growth mindset.