Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1514879

Students' cross-domain mindset profiles and academic achievement in Finnish lower-secondary education

Provisionally accepted

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This study aimed to explore lower-secondary school students' (N = 1106) mindsets with a personcentered approach across multiple domains. The relationship between mindset profiles and school achievement across various subjects (e.g., math, music) and gender was also examined. Intelligence, giftedness, and creativity-related mindsets were measured using a self-reported questionnaire. Latent profile analysis on the three mindset measures was conducted and school achievement and gender differences in profile membership were inspected. Four mindset profiles were revealed, three of which-Growth, Fixed, Mixed-were characterized by consistent mindsets across the three domains, and one profile-Opposing-by a growth mindset about intelligence and creativity but a fixed mindset about giftedness. Students in the Opposing-Mindsets profile outperformed others in math and foreign languages, while students in the Growth-Mindsets profile achieved the best grades in other subjects.Students in the Fixed-Mindsets profile had the lowest grades, but in reading, foreign languages, and music, achievement was equally low in the Mixed-Mindsets profile. The results suggest that adolescent students' learning-related mindsets generally span across the three domains, although some students show notable differences in their domain-specific mindsets.

    Keywords: Mindset1, domain-specificity2, Latent profile analysis3, creativity4, lower-secondary education5

    Received: 21 Oct 2024; Accepted: 06 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Laurell, Puusepp, Hakkarainen and Tirri. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jenni K Laurell, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.