Growth mindset and its predictive validitydo migration background and academic validation matter?

A wide range of mindset interventions has been designed to tackle the educational gap and improve the academic achievements of underperforming students. These interventions often target small student samples in experimental or homogeneous educational settings. This paper will explicitly emphasize the role of context in the relationship between growth mindset and academic achievement in order to optimize the potential impact of mindset interventions. Based on the Self-System of Motivational Development, we offer a framework which allows for investigating the mediating function of growth mindset between the contextual factors of minority background and academic validation, as well as students' levels of academic adjustment and academic outcome. Our data, drawn from survey research (N=1549) in a Belgian university, indicate both an inverse, negative effect of mindset on academic outcomeswith little impact of context on mindsetas well as positive effects of academic validation on academic outcome among minority students. These results suggest that academic outcome depends on more than whether students are located on the positive or negative side of the mindset spectrum.