Cross-lagged panel study reveals reciprocal relationships among growth mindset, engagement, and self-efficacy in students, indicating important implications for educational practices.
Drawing on social cognitive theory and implicit theories, this study used a two-wave longitudinal design to explore the reciprocal associations among students’ growth mindset, behavioral engagement, and self-efficacy in mathematics learning and check the mediating role of behavioral engagement. A total of 784 Chinese secondary school students participated in the study. Longitudinal measurement invariance analyses supported strong invariance for all three measures. Results of structural equation modeling supported the reciprocal relationships among growth mindset, behavioral engagement and self-efficacy. The bootstrap analyses confirmed the mediating role of behavioral engagement between the two motivational beliefs. These results provide new longitudinal evidence for dynamic interplay between growth mindset and self-efficacy and highlight the important role of behavioral engagement in students’ motivational development.
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Guo et al. (2026) studied this question.
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