Mindset and Academic Performance

Contemporary authors and researchers such as Dweck, Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly point out the great impact of the prevailing mindset on academic performance. The underlying idea is that people with a fixed mindset are unwilling to put in extra effort into learning, while people with a growth mindset should achieve better learning outcomes. The purpose of the paper is to present fixed and growth mindsets through a cross-section of previous research and their impact on academic performance. We conducted our own quantitative research with 353 student respondents from three Slovenian faculties. In doing so, we used the questionnaire by Dweck (2017) to identify the prevailing mindset, to which we added questions to test our hypotheses and find answers to our research questions. We found that there is a statistically significant relationship between the growth mindset and academic performance as the prevailing mindset also influences the relationship with academic failure.