To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement? Two Meta-Analyses

Meta-analysis 1 (correlational) k = 273, N = 365,915. Meta-analysis 2 (interventions) k = 43 studies from 38 independent samples, N = 57,155

Mixed ages and countries; academic achievement outcomes.

The first serious deflation of the mindset literature, and the paper that provoked the whole subsequent exchange. Random-effects meta-analysis with moderators for socioeconomic status, academic risk and age, and - the innovation that mattered - coding of whether each intervention study reported a successful manipulation check.

The overall mindset-achievement correlation is r = .09, about one percent of variance. The pooled intervention effect on achievement is d = 0.08 (95% CI 0.02 to 0.14). The internal moderator is the damaging part - the achievement effect was significant only in studies that did NOT report a manipulation check or where the manipulation check FAILED, and was not significant where the manipulation succeeded. About a third of intervention studies reported no manipulation check at all, and of those that did, roughly half failed.

Low for the intervention synthesis. The correlational half is observational and, at r = .09, is in any case too small to survive the archive's default confounding discount.

Reproduced and strengthened by Macnamara and Burgoyne 2023 on a quality-screened sample, where the estimate falls to 0.02 in the highest-quality studies and to non-significance after trim-and-fill.